All age writers till post modern

Famous writes of English literature

0450 - 1066: Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period
Major Writers:

Beowulf (Anonymous)


1066 - 1500: Middle English Period
Major Writers:

Geoffrey Chaucer


1500 - 1600: The Renaissance (Early Modern) Period

1558 - 1603: Elizabethan Age

Major Writers:

Christopher Marlowe

Edmund Spenser

Francis Beaumont

John Fletcher

Sir Philip Sidney

Thomas Dekker

Thomas Wyatt

William Shakespeare


1603 - 1625: Jacobean Age

Major Writers:

Ben Jonson

John Webster

Thomas Kyd

George Chapman

John Donne

George Herbert

Emilia Lanyer


1625 - 1649: Caroline Age

Major Writers:

John Ford

John Milton


1649 - 1660: Commonwealth Period

Major Writers:

John Milton

Andrew Marvell

Thomas Hobbes


1660 - 1700: Restoration Period
Major Writers:

John Dryden


1700 - 1745: The Augustan Age
Major Writers:

Alexander Pope

Jonathan Swift

Samuel Johnson


1745 - 1783: The Age Of Sensibility

1785 - 1830: The Romantic Period

Major Writers:

William Wordsworth

S.T. Coleridge

Jane Austen

the Brontës


1832 - 1901: The Victorian Period
Major Writers:

Charles Dickens

George Eliot

Robert Browning

Alfred Lord Tennyson


1848 - 1860: The Pre-Raphaelites
Major Writers:

William Holman Hunt

John Everett Millais

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

William Michael Rossetti

James Collinson

Frederic George Stephens

Thomas Woolner


1880 - 1901: Aestheticism and Decadence


1901 - 1910: The Edwardian Period
Major Writers:

J. M. Barrie

Arnold Bennett

Joseph Conrad

E. M. Forster

John Galsworthy

Kenneth Grahame

Edith Nesbit

Beatrix Potter

Lucy Maud Montgomery

H. G. Wells

P. G. Wodehouse


1910 - 1914: The Georgian Period

Major Writers:

G.M. Hopkins

H.G. Wells

James Joyce

D.H. Lawrence

T.S. Eliot


1914 - 1945: The Modern Period

Major Writers:

Knut Hamsun

James Joyce

Mikhail Bulgakov

T. S. Eliot

Virginia Woolf

John Steinbeck

D. H. Lawrence

Ezra Pound

William Faulkner

Ernest Hemingway

Katherine Anne Porter

E. M. Forster

Franz Kafka

Joseph Conrad

W. B. Yeats

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Samuel Beckett

Robert Frost


1945 - Present: Post Modern Period

Major Writers:

Ted Hughes

Doris Lessing

John Fowles

Don DeLillo

A.S. Byatt

Important Literature mcq for Net exam

IMPORTANT MCQ SERIES ON ENGLISH LITERATURE FOR NET


1. The epigraph of The Waste Land is borrowed from?
(A) Virgil
(B) Fetronius
(C) Seneca
(D) Homer✔

2. Who called ‘The Waste Land ‘a music of ideas’?
(A) Allen Tate✔
(B) J. C. Ransom
(C) I. A. Richards
(D) F. R Leavis

3. T. S. Eliot has borrowed the term ‘Unreal City’ in the first and third
sections from?
(A) Baudelaire
(B) Irving Babbit
(C) Dante✔
(D) Laforgue

4. Which of the following myths does not figure in The Waste
Land?
(A) Oedipus
(B) Grail Legend of Fisher King
(C) Philomela
(D) Sysyphus✔

5. Joe Gargery is Pip’s?
(A) brother
(B) brother-in-Jaw
(C) guardian✔
(D) cousin

6. Estella is the daughter of?
(A) Joe Gargery✔
(B) Abel Magwitch .
(C) Miss Havisham
(D) Bentley Drumnile

7. 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

8. Graham Greene’s novels are marked by?
(A) Catholicism✔
(B) Protestantism
(C) Paganism
(D) Buddhism

9. One important feature of Jane Austen’s style is?
(A) boisterous humour
(B) humour and pathos✔
(C) subtlety of irony
(D) stream of consciousness

10. 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

11. The main character in Paradise Lost Book I and Book II is?
(A God
(B) Satan✔
(C) Adam
(D) Eve

12. In Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel’s mother’s name is?
(A)Susan
(B)Jane
(C)Gertrude✔
(D) Emily

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.Mr. Jaggers, in Great Expectations, is a
(A) lawyer✔
(B) postman
(C)Judge
(D) School teacher

15. What does ‘I’ stand for in the following line?
‘To Carthage then I came’
(A) Buddha
(B) Tiresias
(C) Smyrna Merchant
(D) Augustine✔

IMPORTANT MCQ SERIES ON ENGLISH LITERATURE FOR NET




16. The following lines are an example……… of image.
‘The river sweats
Oil and tar’
(A) visual
(B) kinetic
(C) erotic✔
(D) sensual

17. Which of the following novels has the sub-title ‘A Novel Without a Hero’?
(A) Vanity Fair✔
(B) Middlemarch
(C) Wuthering Heights
(D) Oliver Twist

18. In ‘Leda and the Swan’, who wooes Leda in guise of a swan?
(A) Mars
(B) Hercules
(C) Zeus
(D) Bacchus✔

19. Who invented the term ‘Sprung rhythm’?
(A)Hopkins✔
(B)Tennyson
(C)Browning
(D)Wordsworth

20.Who wrote the poem ‘Defence of Lucknow’?
(A) Browning
(B) Tennyson
(C) Swinburne✔
(D) Rossetti

21.Which of the following plays of Shakespeare has an epilogue?
(A) The Tempest✔
(B) Henry IV, Pt I
(C) Hamlet
(D) Twelfth Night

22. Hamlet’s famous speech ‘To be,or not to be; that is the question’
occurs in?
(A) Act II, Scene I
(B) Act III, Scene III
(C) Act IV, Scene III
(D) Act III, Scene I✔

23. Identify the character in The Tempest who is referred to as an honest old counselor
(A) Alonso
(B) Ariel
(C) Gonzalo✔
(D) Stephano

24. What is the sub-title of the play Twelfth Night?
(A) Or, What is you Will
(B) Or, What you Will✔
(C) Or, What you Like It
(D) Or, What you Think

25. 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

26. Who is Thomas Percy in Henry IV, Pt I?
(A) Earl of Northumberland✔
(B) Earl of March
(C) Earl of Douglas
(D) Earl of Worcester

27. Paradise Lost was originally written in?
(A) ten books
(B) eleven books
(C) nine books
(D) eight books✔

28. In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia elopes with?
(A) Darcy
(B) Wickham✔
(C) William Collins
(D) Charles Bingley

29. Who coined the phrase ‘Egotistical Sublime’?
(A) William Wordsworth
(B) P.B.Shelley
(C) S. T. Coleridge✔
(D) John Keats

30. Who is commonly known as ‘Pip’ in Great Expectations?
(A) Philip Pirrip
(B) Filip Pirip
(C)Philip Pip✔
(D) Philips Pirip



31. The novel The Power and the Glory is set in?
(A)Mexico✔
(B) Italy
(C)France
(D) Germany

32. Which of the following is Golding’s first novel?
(A) The Inheritors
(B) Lord of the Flies✔
(C) Pincher Martin
(D) Pyramid

33.Identify the character who is a supporter of Women’s Rights in Sons and Lovers?
(A) Mrs. Morel✔
(B) Annie
(C) Miriam
(D) Clara Dawes

34. Vanity Fair is a novel by?
(A) Jane Austen
(B) Charles Dickens
(C) W. M. Thackeray✔
(D) Thomas Hardy

35. Shelley’s Adonais is an elegy on the death of?
(A) Milton
(B) Coleridge
(C) Keats✔
(D) Johnson

36. Which of the following is the first novel of D. H. Lawrence?
(A) The White Peacock✔
(B) The Trespasser
(C) Sons and Lovers
(D) Women in Love

37. In the poem ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘dearest friend’ refers to?
(A) Nature
(B) Dorothy✔
(C) Coleridge
(D) Wye

38. Who, among the following, is not the second generation of British
Romantics?
(A) Keats
(B) Wordsworth✔
(C) Shelley
(D) Byron

39. Which of the following poems of Coleridge is a ballad?
(A) Work Without Hope
(B) Frost at Midnight
(C) The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner✔
(D) Youth and Age

40. Identify the writer who was expelled from Oxford for circulating a pamphlet—
(A) P. B. Shelley✔
(B) Charles Lamb
(C) Hazlitt
(D) Coleridge

IMPORTANT MCQ SERIES ON ENGLISH LITERATURE FOR NET



41. Keats’s Endymion is dedicated to?
(A) Leigh Hunt✔
(B) Milton
(C) Shakespeare
(D) Thomas Chatterton


42. The second series of Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb was published in?
(A) 1823
(B) 1826
(C) 1834
(D) 1833✔

43. Which of the following poets does not belong to the ‘Lake School’?
(A) Keats✔
(B) Coleridge
(C) Southey
(D) Wordsworth

44.Who, among the following writers, was not educated at Christ’s Hospital School,
London?
(A) Charles Lamb✔
(B) William Wordsworth
(C) Leigh Hunt
(D) S. T. Coleridge

45. Who derided Hazlitt as one of the members of the ‘Cockney School of Poetry’?
(A) Tennyson
(8) Charles Lamb
(C) Lockhart
(D) T. S. Eliot✔

46. Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam’was written in memory of?
(A) A. H. Hallam✔
(B) Edward King
(C) Wellington
(D) P. B. Shelley


47. Who, among the following, is not connected with the Oxford Movement?
(A) Robert Browning✔
(B) John Keble
(C) E. B. Pusey
(D) J. H. Newman

48. Identify the work by Swinburne which begins “when the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces..”?
(A) Chastelard
(B) A Song of Italy
(C) Atalanta in Calydon✔
(D) Songs before Sunrise

49. Carlyle’s work On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History is a course of?
(A) six lectures
(B) five lectures✔
(C) four lectures
(D) seven lectures

50. Who is praised as a hero by Carlyle in his lecture on the ‘Hero as King’?
(A) Johnson
(B) Cromwell✔
(C) Shakespeare
(D) Luther



51. 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) Modem Painters✔

52. 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✔

53.✳✳ 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✔

54. 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

55. ✳✴Identify the writer who first used blank verse in English poetry?
(A) Sir Thomas Wyatt
(B) William Shakespeare
(C) Earl of Surrey✔
(D) Milton

56. The Aesthetic Movement which blossomed during the 1880s was not influenced by?
(A) The Pre-Raphaelites
(B) Ruskin
(C) Pater
(D) Matthew Arnold✔

57. 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

58. ✴✴W. B. Yeats used the phrase ‘the artifice of eternity’ in his poem?
(A) Sailing to Byzantium✔
(B) Byzantium
(C) The Second Coming
(D) Leda and the Swan

59. Who is Pip’s friend in London?
(A) Pumblechook
(B) Herbert Pocket
(C) Bentley Drummle
(D) Jaggers✔

60. Who is Mr. Tench in The Power and the Glory?
(A) A teacher
(B) A clerk
(C) A thief✔
(D) A dentist


IMPORTANT MCQ SERIES ON ENGLISH LITERATURE FOR NET



Stay tuned for more mcqs on literature...

English Net exam paper of June 2010

English Net exam paper of June 2010

1. The epithet “a comic epic in prose” is best applied to

(A) Richardson’s Pamela

(B) Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey
(C) Fielding’s Tom Jones
(D) Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe


2. Muriel Spark has written a dystopian novel called

(A) Memento Mori

(B) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

(C) Robinson

(D) The Ballad of Peckham Rye

3. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon is an example of

(A) Feminist Literature
(B) Utopian Literature
(C) War Literature
(D) Famine Literature


4. The line “moments of unageing intellect” occurs in Yeats’s

(A) Byzantium
(B) Among School Children
(C) Sailing to Byzantium
(D) The Circus Animals’ Desertion


5. In his 1817 review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Francis Jeffrey grouped the following poets together as the ‘Lake School of Poets’:

(A) Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge
(B) Wordsworth, Byron and Coleridge
(C) Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge
(D) Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey


6. Which of the following novels is not by Patrick White?

(A) The Vivisector
(B) The Tree of Man
(C) Voss
(D) Oscar and Lucienda


7. The famous line “……. where ignorant armies clash by night” is taken from a poem by

(A) Wilfred Owen
(B) W.H. Auden
(C) Siegfried Sassoon
(D) Matthew Arnold


8. Which among the following novels is not written by Margaret Atwood?

(A) Surfacing
(B) The Blind Assassin
(C) The Handmaid’s Tale
(D) The Stone Angel


9. The term ‘theatre of cruelty’ was coined by 

(A) Robert Brustein
(B) Antonin Artaud
(C) Augusto Boal
(D) Luigi Pirandello


10. The verse form of Byron’s Childe Haroldwas influenced by

(A) Milton
(B) Spenser
(C) Shakespeare
(D) Pope


11. Tennyson’s Ulysses is

(I) a poem expressing the need for going forward and braving the struggles of life
(II) a dramatic monologue
(III) a morbid poem
(IV) a poem making extensive use of satire 

The right combination for the above statement, according to the code, is

(A) I & IV
(B) II and III
(C) III and IV
(D) I and II


12. Which post-war British poet was involved in a disastrous marriage with Sylvia Plath?

(A) Philip Larkin
(B) Ted Hughes
(C) Stevie Smith
(D) Geoffrey Hill


13. Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles is in part

(I) a puzzle
(II) a debate
(III) a threnody
(IV) a beast fable

The correct combination for the above statement, according to the code, is

(A) I, II & IV
(B) II, III & IV
(C) I & IV
(D) II & IV


14. Who among the following wrote a book with the title The Age of Reason ?

(A) William Godwin
(B) Edmund Burke
(C) Thomas Paine
(D) Edward Gibbon


15. The Restoration comedy has been criticized mainly for its

(A) excessive wit and humour
(B) bitter satire and cynicism
(C) indecency and permissiveness
(D) superficial reflection of society


16. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is an essay by

(A) Terry Eagleton
(B) Karl Marx
(C) Raymond Williams
(D) Louis Althusser


17. Sexual possessiveness is a theme of Shakespeare’s

(A) Coriolanus
(B) Julius Caesar
(C) Henry IV Part – I
(D) A Midsummer Night’s Dream


18. The term ‘Cultural Materialism’ is associated with

(A) Stephen Greenblatt
(B) Raymond Williams
(C) Matthew Arnold
(D) Richard Hoggart


19. Which of the following author book pair is correctly matched ?

(A) Muriel Spark – Under the Net
(B) William – Girls of Golding Slender Means
(C) Angus Wilson – Lucky Jim
(D) Doris Lessing – The Grass is Singing


20. Who among the following is a Canadian critic?

(A) I.A. Richards
(B) F.R. Leavis
(C) Cleanth Brooks
(D) Northrop Frye


21. Sethe is a character in

(A) The Colour Purple
(B) The Women of Brewster Place
(C) Beloved
(D) Lucy


22. Imagined Communities is a book by

(A) Aijaz Ahmad
(B) Edward Said
(C) Perry Anderson
(D) Benedict Anderson


23. Who among the following is a Cavalier poet?

(A) Henry Vaughan
(B) Richard Crashaw
(C) John Suckling
(D) Anne Finch


24. Which play of Wilde has the subtitle, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People ?

(A) A Woman of No Importance
(B) Lady Windermere’s Fan
(C) The Importance of Being Earnest
(D) An Ideal Husband


25. Which of the following plays is not written by Wole Soyinka ?

(A) The Lion and the Jewel
(B) The Dance of the Forests
(C) Master Harold and the Boys
(D) Kongi’s Harvest

26. Which of the following plays by William Wycherley is in part an adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope ?

(A) The Plain Dealer
(B) The Country Wife
(C) Love in a Wood
(D) The Gentleman Dancing Master


27. ‘Inversion’ is the change in the word order for creating rhetorical effect, e.g. this book I like. Another term for inversion is 

(A) Hypallage
(B) Hubris
(C) Haiku
(D) Hyperbaton


28. The phrase ‘the willing suspension of disbelief ’ occurs in 

(A) Biographia Literaria
(B) Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(C) In Defence of Poetry
(D) Poetics


29. The religious movement ‘Methodism’ in the 18th century England was founded by

(A) John Tillotson
(B) Bishop Butler
(C) Bernard Mandeville
(D) John Welsey


30. My First Acquaintance with Poets, an unforgettable account of meeting with literary heroes, is written by

(A) Charles Lamb
(B) Thomas de Quincey
(C) Leigh Hunt
(D) William Hazlitt

31. The figure of the Warrior Virgin in Spenser’s Faerie Queene is represented by the character

(A) Britomart
(B) Gloriana
(C) Cynthia
(D) Duessa


32. The book Speech Acts is written by

(A) John Austin
(B) John Searle
(C) Jacques Derrida
(D) Ferdinand de Saussure


33. Which among the following is not a sonnet sequence ?

(A) Philip Sydney – Astrophel and Stella
(B) Samuel Daniel – Delia
(C) Derek Walcott – Omeroos
(D) D.G. Rossetti – The House of Life


34. ‘Incunabula’ refers to 

(A) books censured by the Roman Emperor
(B) books published before the year 1501
(C) books containing an account of myths and rituals
(D) books wrongly attributed to an author


35. The most notable achievement in Jacobean prose was

(A) Bacon’s Essays
(B) King James’ translation of the Bible
(C) Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
(D) None of the above


36. The Court of Chancery is a setting in Dickens’

(A) Little Dorrit
(B) Hard Times
(C) Dombey and Son
(D) Bleak House


37. Which romantic poet coined the famous phrase ‘spots of time’?

(A) John Keats
(B) William Wordsworth
(C) S.T. Coleridge
(D) Lord Byron


38. The statement ‘I think, therefore, I am’ is by

(A) Schopenhauer
(B) Plato
(C) Descartes
(D) Sartre


39. Verse that has no set theme – no regular meter, rhyme or stanzaic pattern is

(I) open form
(II) flexible form
(III) free verse
(IV) blank verse

The correct combination for the statement, according to the code, is

(A) I, II and III are correct
(B) III and IV are correct
(C) II, III and IV are correct
(D) I and III are correct


40. Which is the correct sequence of publication of Pinter’s plays?

(A) The Room, One for the Road, No Man’s Land, The Homecoming
(B) The Homecoming, No Man’s Land, The Room, One for the Road
(C) The Room, The Homecoming, No Man’s Land, One for the Road
(D) One for the Road, The Room, The Home coming, No Man’s Land


41. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published in the year

(A) 1710
(B) 1755
(C) 1739
(D) 1759


42. The literary prize, Booker of Bookers, was awarded to

(A) J.M. Coetzee
(B) Nadine Gordimer
(C) Martin Amis
(D) Salman Rushdie


43. In Keats’ poetic career, the most productive year was

(A) 1816
(B) 1817
(C) 1820
(D) 1819


44. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was published in 1712 in

(A) three cantos
(B) four cantos
(C) five cantos
(D) two cantos


45. Stephen Dedalus is a fictional character associated with

I. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
II. Sons and Lovers
III. Ulysses
IV. The Heart of Darkness

The correct combination for the above statement according to the code is

(A) I &; II
(B) I, II &; III
(C) III &; IV
(D) I &; III


46. In Moby Dick Captain Ahab falls for his

(A) ignorance
(B) pride
(C) courage
(D) drunkenness


47. The first complete printed English Bible was produced by

(A) William Tyndale
(B) William Caxton
(C) Miles Coverdale
(D) Roger Ascham


48. Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton is sub-titled

(A) The Two Nations
(B) A Tale of Manchester Life
(C) A Story of Provincial Life
(D) The Factory Girl


49. Some of the Jacobean playwrights were prolific. One of them claimed to have written 200 plays. The playwright is

(A) John Ford
(B) Thomas Dekker
(C) Philip Massinger
(D) Thomas Heywood


50. The concept of “Star-equilibrium” in connection with man-woman relationship appears in

(A) Women in Love
(B) Maurice
(C) Mrs. Dalloway
(D) The Old Wives’ Tales