English Literature Practice Questions – 03

Q31 – The Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) —————-.

1) makes sharply satirical comments on controversial religious and political issues of his day such as Elizabeth’s suppression of Puritan clergy in the Church of England

2) is an allegorical pastoral based on the subject of a visit to London and is written as a lightly veiled account of the trip

3) celebrates, memorializes, and critiques the Tudor dynasty much in the tradition of Virgil’s Aeneids celebration of Augustus Caesar’s Rome (as it suggests that the Tudor lineage can be connected to King Arthur)

4) was basically written to introduce (and expand upon) the scriptural readings prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer for specific dates in the year it was published

Q32 – Which of the following about John Donne (1572-1631) and his work is NOT TRUE?

1) He wrote An Anatomy of the World (1611) to mark the first anniversary of the death of one of his friends and patrons

2) His collection Songs and Sonnets (1633) directly challenges the popular Petrarchan sonnet sequences of the 1590s: it contains only one formal sonnet and the ‘songs’ are not lyrical

3) He penned Pseudo-Martyr (1610) as a Catholic to denounce King James’s insistence that Catholic take the Oath of Allegiance and subscribe to Protestant ethics.

4) His ‘Divine Poems’, a variety of religious poems, include a group of ‘Holy Sonnets’ that reflect his interest in Jesuit and especially Protestant meditative procedures.

Q33 – As pioneer essayist, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) would —————-.

1) rarely deal with topics ‘Civil and Moral’: his essays are tentative in structure; witty, expansive, and reflective in style: and intimate, candid and affable in tone

2) stand at almost the opposite pole from his French predecessor, Michel de Montaigne, who proposed to learn about humankind by an intensive analysis of his own body and mind

3) often use his ‘I’ to present himself as challenging his society’s supposedly accumulated wisdom

4) generally, write his essays from the vantage point of a profound moralist rather the point of view of a man of affairs—even when writing on such topics as truth, marriage and love

Q34 – Which of the following about John Milton’s career after the execution of Charles I in 1649 is NOT TRUE?

1) He was appointed Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth government, which meant that he wrote official letters to foreign heads of states in Latin

2) He published the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in defense of revolution and regicide

3) He wrote the masque called Comus, in which the villain is portrayed as a refined, seductive and dissolute Cavalier

4) He wrote Eikonoklastes to counter the powerful emotional effect of Eikon Basilike written by the king just before his death

Q35 – John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (published 1682) would ——————.

1) be the outcome of a series of personal, professional and critical collaborations between Dryden and the Restoration poet Thomas Shadwell

2) brilliantly exploit the crudity of the poet Thomas Shadwell’s farces (notably The Virtuoso) and critical writings

3) (usually for a Restoration satirical masterpiece) take advantage of a few allusions, either modern or literature

4) also bitterly satirize work done by other Restoration dramatists, notably his own friend and disciple William Congreve

Q36 – Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella a series of intimate letters (1710-13) mainly to his beloved Esther Johnson ——————–.

1) is addressed, contrary to the ‘Stella’ of the title, to Stella’s life-long companion and friend Rebecca Dingley

2) uniquely contains sketches of fictional adventures originally written to entertain Stella but later on developed and incorporated into his Gulliver’s Travels

3) is devoted exclusively to his love for her and is interspersed with some of Swift’s most poignant love poems

4) gives a vivid account of Swift’s daily life in London where he was in close touch with Tory ministers

Q37 – Which of the following important ‘sets of pictures’ does not belong to the 18th c. painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764) (who had considerable influence on Swift, Fielding and Sterne, among others)?

1) A Harlot’s Progress

2) A Wandering Scholar in the Levant

3) A Rake’s Progress

4) Marriage A-la-Mode

Q38 – Which of the following two 18th c. figures were (best) in a kind of dialogue (albeit in fierce negation of each other) on the subject of women in some of their prominent work?

1) Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson

2) Samuel Johnson and Mary Astell

3) Alexander Pope and Anne Finch

4) Jonathan Swift and Mary Montagu

Q39 – Which of the following ‘emancipations’ WAS NOT on Edmund Burke’s (1729-97) literary / political agenda in the second half of the 18th c.?

1) emancipation of Ireland

2) emancipation of American colonies

3) emancipation of India from the misgovernment of East India Company

4) emancipation of women

Q40 – The English revolutionary and pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) —————.

1) wrote his Age of Reason (1794) while imprisoned in France by the Jacobins for a year in 1793-94 while awaiting the guillotine

2) wrote about his active service in the American War of Independence in his Common Sense (1776)

3) dedicated his Rights of Man (1791), in reaction to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to the French revolutionary Georges Danton

4) published his Rights of Man in two instalments in the radical English journal, The Free Englishman in 1790

Q41 – Which of the following Romantic figures, in her advocacy of natural language and subject matter in her work, prefigured and duly influenced Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads?

1) Maria Edgeworth in her Letters for Literary Ladies

2) Charlotte Smith in her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays

3) Joanna Baillie in her Series of Plays

4) Anna Barbauld in her Devotional Pieces

Q42 – Which of the following about the Romantic poet William Blake (1757-1827) is NOT TRUE?

1) His first attempt to articulate his full humanity’s present, past, and future was The Four Zoas.

2) In his trenchant prophetic satire, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (written in the early 1790s) he represented the French Revolution as a kind f purifying violence.

3) Two of his major prophetic books on which he worked until about 1820 were Milton, and Jerusalem.

4) His Poetical Sketches was idiosyncratically developed largely in illustrations and engravings with only minimal poetry-in-handwriting inserted between.

Q43 – The ‘Romantic essayist / work’ match in all the following EXCEPT —————-.

1) Thomas De Quinccy / ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’

2) Charles Lamb / ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’

3) Thomas De Quinccy / ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’

4) Charles Lamb / ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror

Q44 – William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek —————–.

1) heavily inspired (and is now regarded as the progenitor of)—through its revival of the medieval Gothic ethos—later-eighteenth century Gothic garden design and architecture

2) is widely regarded as the initiating prototype to the genre (published nearly a decade before Walpole’e Otranto appeared)

3) is ‘oriental’ rather than medieval but would, nevertheless, blend cruelty, terror and eroticism

4) purported to be a translation from a twelfth century Italian work, thus setting the fashion for (spuriously) attributing Gothic works’ authorship to the medieval times

Q45 – Which of the following about Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present (1843) is TRUE?

1) He would call for heroic leadership of the type England had previously experienced in Thomas Cromwell and particularly Abbot Samson, a medieval monk.

2) He was particularly concerned with the destructive mobs (now thinly disguised as the ‘Working Aristocracy’) who had to be suppressed at any cost.

3) He had completely washed hands off the ‘present Captains of Victorian Industry’ in matching the artisans of the past in bringing about peace and prosperity to the people of England.

4) He placed enormous confidence on the landed aristocracy as the traditional anchors stability for the British nation in time of trouble.

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