Literature based GK

Literature based GK

1. The epigraph of The Waste Land is borrowed from—

(A) Virgil

(B) Petronius

(C) Seneca

(D) Homer

Ans: (D)

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

Ans: (A)

3. T. S. Eliot has borrowed the term ‘Unreal City’ in first and third sections from—

(A) Baudelaire

(B) Irving Babbit

(C) Dante

(D) Laforgue

Ans: (C)

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

Ans: (D)

5. Joe Gargery is Pip’s—

(A) brother

(B) brother-in-law

(C) guardian

(D) cousin

Ans: (C)

6. Estella is the daughter of—

(A) Joe Gargery

(B) Abel Magwitch

(C) Miss Havisham

(D) Bentley Drummle

Ans: (A)

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

Ans: (C)

8. Graham Greene’s novels are marked by—

(A) Catholicism

(B) Protestantism

(C) Paganism

(D) Buddhism

Ans: (A)

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

Ans: (B)

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

Ans: (A)

11. The main character in Paradise Lost Book I and Book II is—

(A) God

(B) Satan

(C) Adam

(D) Eve

Ans: (B)

12. In Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel’s mother’s name is—

(A) Susan

(B) Jane

(C) Gertrude

(D) Emily

Ans: (C)

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

Ans: (A)

14. Mr. Jaggers, in Great Expectations, is a—

(A) lawyer

(B) postman

(C) judge

(D) school teacher

Ans: (A)

15. What does ‘I’ stand for in the following line ?

‘To Carthage then I came’

(A) Buddha

(B) Tiresias

(C) Smyrna Merchant

(D) Augustine

Ans: (D)

16. The following lines are an example of …… image. ‘The river sweats

Oil and tar’……

(A) visual

(B) kinetic

(C) erotic

(D) sensual

Ans: (C)

17. Which of the following novels has the subtitle ‘A Novel Without a Hero’ ?

(A) Vanity Fair

(B) Middlemarch

(C) Wuthering Heights

(D) Oliver Twist

Ans: (A)

18. In ‘Leda and the Swan’, who wooes Leda in guise of a swan ?

(A) Mars

(B) Hercules

(C) Zeus

(D) Bacchus

Ans: (D)

19. Who invented the term ‘Sprung rhythm’ ?

(A) Hopkins

(B) Tennyson

(C) Browning

(D) Wordsworth

Ans: (A)

20. Who wrote the poem ‘Defence of Lucknow’ ?

(A) Browning

(B) Tennyson

(C) Swinburne

(D) Rossetti

Ans: (C)

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

(A) The Tempest

(B) Henry IV, Pt I

(C) Hamlet

(D) Twelfth Night

Ans: (A)

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

Ans: (D)

23. Identify the character in The Tempest who is referred to as ‘an honest old councellor’—

(A) Alonso

(B) Ariel

(C) Gonzalo

(D) Stephano

Ans: (C)

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

Ans: (B)

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

Ans: (B)

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

Ans: (A)

27. Paradise Lost was originally written in—

(A) ten books

(B) eleven books

(C) nine books

(D) eight books

Ans: (D)

28. In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia elopes with—

(A) Darcy

(B) Wickham

(C) William Collins

(D) Charles Bingley

Ans: (B)

29. Who coined the phrase ‘Egotistical Sublime’?

(A) William Wordsworth

(B) P. B. Shelley

(C) S. T. Coleridge

(D) John Keats

Ans: (C)

30. Who is commonly known as ‘Pip’ in Great Expectations ?

(A) Philip Pirrip

(B) Filip Pirip

(C) Philip Pip

(D) Philips Pirip

Ans: (C)

31. The novel The Power and the Glory is set in—

(A) Mexico

(B) Italy

(C) France

(D) Germany

Ans: (A)

32. Which of the following is Golding’s first novel ?

(A) The Inheritors

(B) Lord of the Flies

(C) Pincher Martin

(D) Pyramid

Ans: (B)

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

Ans: (A)

34. Vanity Fair is a novel by—

(A) Jane Austen

(B) Charles Dickens

(C) W. M. Thackeray

(D) Thomas Hardy

Ans: (C)

35. Shelley’s Adonais is an elegy on the death of—

(A) Milton

(B) Coleridge

(C) Keats

(D) Johnson

Ans: (C)

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

Ans: (A)

37. In the poem ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘dearest friend’ refers to—

(A) Nature

(B) Dorothy

(C) Coleridge

(D) Wye

Ans: (B)

38. Who, among the following, is not the second generation of British Romantics ?

(A) Keats

(B) Wordsworth

(C) Shelley

(D) Byron

Ans: (B)

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

Ans: (C)

40. Identify the writer who was expelled from Oxford for circulating a pamphlet—

(A) P. B. Shelley

(B) Charles Lamb

(C) Hazlitt

(D) Coleridge

Ans: (A)

41. Keats’s Endymion is dedicated to—

(A) Leigh Hunt

(B) Milton

(C) Shakespeare

(D) Thomas Chatterton

Ans: (A)

42. The second series of Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb was published in—

(A) 1823

(B) 1826

(C) 1834

(D) 1833

Ans: (D)

43. Which of the following poets does not belong to the ‘Lake School’ ?

(A) Keats

(B) Coleridge

(C) Southey

(D) Wordsworth

Ans: (A)

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

Ans: (A)

45. Who derided Hazlitt as one of the members of the ‘Cockney School of Poetry’ ?

(A) Tennyson

(B) Charles Lamb

(C) Lockhart

(D) T. S. Eliot

Ans: (D)

46. Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam’ was written in memory of—

(A) A. H. Hallam

(B) Edward King

(C) Wellington

(D) P. B. Shelley

Ans: (A)

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

Ans: (A)

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

Ans: (C)

49. Carlyle’s work On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History is a course of—

(A) six lectures

(B) five lectures

(C) four lectures

(D) seven lectures

Ans: (B)

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

Ans: (B)

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) Modern Painters

Ans: (D)

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

Ans: (D)

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

Ans: (D)

54. 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

Ans: (C)

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

Ans: (C)

56. The Aesthetic Movement which blossomed during the 1880s was not influenced by—

(A) The Pre-Raphaelites

(B) Ruskin

(C) Pater

(D) Matthew Arnold

Ans: (D)

57. Identify the rhetorical figure used in the following line of Tennyson : ‘‘Faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.’’

(A) Oxymoron

(B) Metaphor

(C) Simile

(D) Synecdoche

Ans: (A)

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

Ans: (A)

59. Who is Pip’s friend in London ?

(A) Pumblechook

(B) Herbert Pocket

(C) Bentley Drummle

(D) Jaggers

Ans: (D)

60. Who is Mr. Tench in The Power and the Glory ?

(A) A teacher

(B) A clerk

(C) A thief

(D) A dentist

Ans: (C)

61. Pride and Prejudice was originally a youthful work entitled—

(A) ‘Last Impressions’

(B) ‘False Impressions’

(C) ‘First Impressions’

(D) ‘True Impressions’

Ans: (C)

62. Identify the novel in which the character of Charlotte Lucas figures—

(A) Great Expectations

(B) The Power and the Glory

(C) Lord of the Flies

(D) Pride and Prejudice

Ans: (D)

63. ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’’ The line given above occurs in

(A) Hamlet

(B) Henry IV, Pt I

(C) The Tempest

(D) Twelfth Night

Ans: (A)

64. Who said that Shakespeare in his comedies has only heroines and no heroes ?

(A) Ben Jonson

(B) John Ruskin

(C) Thomas Carlyle

(D) William Hazlitt

Ans: (B)

65. Sir John Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest—

(A) comic figures

(B) historical figures

(C) romantic figures

(D) tragic figures

Ans: (A)

66. That Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it, was said by—

(A) Blake

(B) Eliot

(C) Johnson

(D) Shelley

Ans: (A)

67. Who called Shelley ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’ ?

(A) Walter Pater

(B) A. C. Swinburne

(C) Matthew Arnold

(D) T. S. Eliot

Ans: (C)

68. Essays of Elia are—

(A) full of didactic sermonising

(B) practically autobiographical fragments

(C) remarkable for their aphoristic style

(D) satirical and critical

Ans: (B)

69. The theme of Tennyson’s Poem ‘The Princess’ is—

(A) Queen Victoria’s coronation

(B) Industrial Revolution

(C) Women’s Education and Rights

(D) Rise of Democracy

Ans: (C)

70. Thackeray’s Esmond is a novel of historical realism capturing the spirit of—

(A) the Medieval age

(B) the Elizabethan age

(C) the age of Queen Anne

(D) the Victorian age

Ans: (A)

71. Oedipus Complex is—

(A) a kind of physical ailment

(B) a kind of vitamin

(C) a brother’s attraction towards his sister

(D) a son’s attraction towards his mother

Ans: (D)

72. ‘My own great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than the intellect.’’ Who wrote this ?

(A) Graham Greene

(B) D. H. Lawrence

(C) Charles Dickens

(D) Jane Austen

Ans: (B)

73. Shakespeare makes fun of the Puritans in his play—

(A) Twelfth Night

(B) Hamlet

(C) The Tempest

(D) Henry IV, Pt I

Ans: (A)

74. ‘The rarer action is in virtue that in vengeance.’ This line occurs in—

(A) Hamlet

(B) Henry IV, Pt I

(C) The Tempest

(D) Twelfth Night

Ans: (C)

75. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a—

(A) Picaresque novel

(B) Gothic novel

(C) Domestic novel

(D) Historical novel

Ans: (C)

76. ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’. This line occurs in the poem—

(A) Immortality Ode

(B) Tintern Abbey

(C) The Second Coming

(D) Leda and the Swan

Ans: (A)

77. Wordsworth calls himself ‘a Worshipper of Nature’ in his poem—

(A) Immortality Ode

(B) Tintern Abbey

(C) The Prelude

(D) The Solitary Reaper

Ans: (B)

78. When Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ was first published in 1802, it had only—

(A) Stanzas I to IV

(B) Stanzas I to V

(C) Stanzas I to VI

(D) Stanzas I to VII

Ans: (B)

79. Which method of narration has been employed by Dickens in his novel Great Expectations ?

(A) Direct or epic method

(B) Documentary method

(C) Stream of Consciousness technique

(D) Autobiographical method

Ans: (A)

80. Who said ‘Keats was a Greek’ ?

(A) Wordsworth

(B) Coleridge

(C) Lamb

(D) Shelley

Ans: (B)

81. D. G. Rossetti was a true literary descendant of—

(A) Keats

(B) Byron

(C) Shelley

(D) Wordsworth

Ans: (A)

82. To which character in Hamlet does the following description apply ? ‘‘The tedious wiseacre who meddles his way to his doom.’’

(A) Claudius

(B) Hamlet

(C) Polonius

(D) Rosencrantz

Ans: (B)

83. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ is a quotation from—

(A) Milton

(B) William Shakespeare

(C) T. S. Eliot

(D) Ruskin

Ans: (B)

84. ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale’. Who speaks the lines given above in Twelfth Night ?

(A) Duke Orsino

(B) Malvolio

(C) Sir Andrew Aguecheek

(D) Sir Toby Belch

Ans: (D)

85. In Paradise Lost, Book I, Satan is the embodiment of Milton’s—

(A) Sense of injured merit

(B) Hatred of tyranny

(C) Spirit of revolt

(D) All these

Ans: (C)

86. Who calls poetry ‘the breadth and finer spirit of all knowledge’ ?

(A) Wordsworth

(B) Shelley

(C) Keats

(D) Coleridge

Ans: (A)

87. Twelfth Night opens with the speech of—

(A) Viola

(B) Duke

(C) Olivia

(D) Malvolio

Ans: (B)

88. What was the cause of William’s death in Sons and Lovers ?

(A) An accident

(B) An overdose of morphia

(C) Suicide

(D) Pneumonia

Ans: (D)

89. Which poem of Coleridge is an opium dream ?

(A) Kubla Khan

(B) Christabel

(C) The Ancient Mariner

(D) Ode on the Departing Year

Ans: (A)

90. Which stanza form did Shelley use in his famous poem ‘Ode to theWest Wind’ ?

(A) Rime royal

(B) Ottava rima

(C) Terza rima

(D) Spenserian Stanza

Ans: (C)

91. The phrase ‘Pathetic fallacy’ is coined by—

(A) Milton

(B) Coleridge

(C) Carlyle

(D) John Ruskin

Ans: (D)

92. Tracts for the Times relates to—

(A) The Oxford Movement

(B) The Pre-Raphaelite Movement

(C) The Romantic Movement

(D) The Symbolist Movement

Ans: (A)

93. 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

Ans: (A)

94. Who wrote Biographia Literaria ?

(A) Byron

(B) Shelley

(C) Coleridge

(D) Lamb

Ans: (C)

95. Who was Fortinbras ?

(A) Claudius’s son

(B) Son to the king of Norway

(C) Ophelia’s lover

(D) Hamlet’s friend

Ans: (B)

96. How many soliloquies are spoken by Hamlet in the play Hamlet ?

(A) Nine

(B) Seven

(C) Five

(D) Three

Ans: (C)

97. ‘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

Ans: (C)

98. William Morel in Sons and Lovers is drawn after—

(A) Lawrence’s father

(B) Lawrence’s brother

(C) Lawrence himself

(D) None of these

Ans: (D)

99. The most notable characteristic of Keats’ poetry is—

(A) Satire

(B) Sensuality

(C) Sensuousness

(D) Social reform

Ans: (C)

100. The key-note of Browning’s philosophy of life is—

(A) agnosticism

(B) optimism

(C) pessimism

(D) scepticism

Ans: (B)

101. The title of Carlyle’s ‘Sartor Resartus’ means—

(A) Religious Scripture

(B) Seaside Resort

(C) Tailor Repatched

(D) None of these

Ans: (C)

102. Epipsychidion is composed by—

(A) Coleridge

(B) Wordsworth

(C) Keats

(D) Shelley

Ans: (D)

103. ‘The better part of valour is discretion’ occurs in Shakespeare’s—

(A) Hamlet

(B) Twelfth Night

(C) The Tempest

(D) Henry IV, Pt I

Ans: (D)

104. Epic similes are found in which work of John Milton ?

(A) Paradise Lost

(B) Sonnets

(C) Lycidas

(D) Areopagitica

Ans: (A)

105. Identify the writer who used a pseudonym, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, for much of his early work—

(A) Charles Dickens

(B) W. M. Thackeray

(C) Graham Greene

(D) D. H. Lawrence

Ans: (C)

106. Browning’s famous poem ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ is included in—

(A) Dramatis Personae

(B) Dramatic Idyls

(C) Asolando

(D) Red Cotton Night-Cap Country

Ans: (A)

107. S. T. Coleridge was an Associate of—

(A) The Royal Society of Edinburgh

(B) The Royal Society of London

(C) Royal Society of Arts

(D) Royal Society of Literature

Ans: (D)

108. Which of the following is an unfinished novel by Jane Austen ?

(A) Sense and Sensibility

(B) Mansfield Park

(C) Sandition

(D) Persuasion

Ans: (C)

109. Why did Miss Havisham remain a spinster throughout her life in Great Expectations ?

(A) She was poor

(B) She was arrogant

(C) Because she was betrayed by the bridegroom

(D) She was unwilling to marry

Ans: (B)

110. W. B. Yeats received the Nobel Prize for literature in the year—

(A) 1938

(B) 1925

(C) 1932

(D) 1923

Ans: (D)

111. The Romantic Revival in English Poetry was influenced by the—

(A) French Revolution

(B) Glorious Revolution of 1688

(C) Reformation

(D) Oxford Movement

Ans: (A)

112. The Pre-Raphaelite poets were mostly indebted to the poets of the—

(A) Puritan movement

(B) Romantic revival

(C) Neo-classical age

(D) Metaphysical school

Ans: (B)

113. ‘O, you are sick of self-love.’ Who is referred to in these words in Twelfth Night ?

(A) Orsino

(B) Sir Andrew

(C) Sir Toby

(D) Malvolio

Ans: (D)

114. Hamlet is—

(A) an intellectual

(B) a man of action

(C) a passionate lover

(D) an over ambitious man

Ans: (C)

115. Which of Shakespeare’s characters exclaims; ‘Brave, new, world !’ ?

(A) Ferdinand

(B) Antonio

(C) Miranda

(D) Prospero

Ans: (C)

116. Paradise Lost shows an influence of—

(A) Paganism

(B) Pre-Christian theology

(C) Christianity and the Renaissance

(D) Greek nihilism

Ans: (C)

117. The style of Paradise Lost is—

(A) more Latin than most poems

(B) more spontaneous than thought out

(C) more satirical than spontaneous

(D) more dramatic than lyrical

Ans: (A)

118. In Pride and Prejudice we initially dislike but later tend to like—

(A) Mr. Bennet

(B) Wickham

(C) Bingley

(D) Darcy

Ans: (D)

119. Who in Hamlet suggests that one should neither be a lender nor a borrower ?

(A) Gertrude

(B) Polonius

(C) Horatio

(D) Hamlet

Ans: (B)

120. Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Pt I contains his—

(A) senecan attitude

(B) patriotism

(C) love of nature

(D) platonic ideals

Ans: (B)

Answers

1. (D)           2. (A)            3. (C)           4. (D)           5. (C)

6. (A)            7. (C)           8. (A)            9. (B)            10. (A)

11. (B)         12. (C)         13. (A)         14. (A)         15. (D)

16. (C)         17. (A)         18. (D)         19. (A)         20. (C)

21. (A)         22. (D)         23. (C)         24. (B)         25. (B)

26. (A)         27. (D)         28. (B)         29. (C)         30. (C)

31. (A)         32. (B)         33. (A)         34. (C)         35. (C)

36. (A)         37. (B)         38. (B)         39. (C)         40. (A)

41. (A)         42. (D)         43. (A)         44. (A)         45. (D)

46. (A)         47. (A)         48. (C)         49. (B)         50. (B)

51. (D)         52. (D)         53. (D)         54. (C)         55. (C)

56. (D)         57. (A)         58. (A)         59. (D)         60. (C)

61. (C)         62. (D)         63. (A)         64. (B)         65. (A)

66. (A)         67. (C)         68. (B)         69. (C)         70. (A)

71. (D)         72. (B)         73. (A)         74. (C)         75. (C)

76. (A)         77. (B)         78. (B)         79. (A)         80. (B)

81. (A)         82. (B)         83. (B)         84. (D)         85. (C)

86. (A)         87. (B)         88. (D)         89. (A)         90. (C)

91. (D)         92. (A)         93. (A)         94. (C)         95. (B)

96. (C)         97. (C)         98. (D)         99. (C)         100. (B)

101. (C)       102. (D)       103. (D)       104. (A)       105. (C)

106. (A)       107. (D)       108. (C)       109. (B)       110. (D)

111. (A)       112. (B)       113. (D)       114. (C)       115. (C)

116. (C)       117. (A)       118. (D)       119. (B)       120. (B)

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