Block III: Major Periods of Literature - II Introduction to Literature

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SGOU FYUGP BA English: Introduction to Literature
Block III: Major Periods of Literature - II

Question and Answer Bank: Units 1, 2, 3 & 4

Unit 1: The Romantic Age

#	Question	Answer
1	Which literary period came before the romantic age?	The Neoclassical Age
2	Who published Lyrical Ballads?	William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
3	Whose works set the stage for the romantic poets?	Pre-romantics
4	What was the primary subject of romantic literature?	Nature
5	Why did poetry become a dominant genre in the romantic period?	Poetry was considered to be closer to emotional expression.
6	Who are the Lake poets?	Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey
7	How did Wordsworth transform poetic language?	By writing about everyday themes in the language of common folks
8	What is the name of Coleridge’s critical treatise?	Biographia Literaria
9	Which romantic poet is famous for powerful imagery and revolutionary zeal?	P.B. Shelley
10	What is the title of Byron’s satirical response?	“English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”
11	Which artistic concept did Keats explore?	Negative capability
12	Who are the important romantic prose-writers?	Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey
13	Which style of novel focuses on terror and mysteries?	Gothic Novels
14	What is the difference between the themes of Austen and Scott?	Austen and Scott wrote domestic and historical fiction respectively.
15	What kind of drama is The Cenci?	Closet-drama

 

Unit 2: The Victorian Age

#	Question	Answer
1	Who ruled England during the Victorian Age?	Queen Victoria
2	What is the general time period of the Victorian Age?	1832 to 1901
3	Which class emerged as powerful during the Victorian Era?	Middle-class
4	Which form of literature was considered important during this period?	Prose
5	What did Victorian writers consider to be the purpose of literature?	Both education and entertainment
6	What is the literary attempt to portray reality as it is, called?	Realism
7	What were women encouraged to be in Victorian society?	‘Angels in the home’
8	Which poet shows a combination of reason and spirituality?	Lord Tennyson
9	Whose poems use ‘dramatic monologue’?	Robert Browning
10	What ideals did Arnold want to bring back?	Neoclassical ideals
11	Who are the two significant minor poets of the age?	Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough
12	Why were the Pre-Raphaelite poets called the ‘Fleshly school of poetry’?	Their focus on realistic, sensual depictions
13	Who wrote the work Nicholas Nickleby?	Charles Dickens
14	Who were the focus of Thackeray’s novels?	Upper class society
15	What was the real name of George Eliot?	Mary Anne Evans
16	Which fictional place appears in Thomas Hardy’s novels?	Wessex
17	Which minor novelist brought up working class issues?	Benjamin Disraeli
18	Who is the minor novelist who focused on adventure?	Robert Louis Stevenson
19	Which two prose-writers composed Sartor Resartus and Modern Painters respectively?	Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin
20	What was the purpose of comedy and satire in the dramas of Wilde?	Social criticism

 

Unit 3: The Modern Period

#	Question	Answer
1	What is the chief mood of the modern period?	Disillusionment, anxiety, and questioning of traditional beliefs
2	Why did traditional values start to fail?	Rapid industrialization, technological advances, and the devastation of WWI
3	Which three modernist works were published in 1922?	The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot), Ulysses (James Joyce), and Jacob's Room (Virginia Woolf)
4	Which form of literature was considered important during this period?	Novel / Modernist Fiction and Poetry
5	Which artistic technique uses perception as the basis for reality?	Impressionism / Stream of Consciousness
6	What is symbolism?	An artistic style using symbols to represent ideas, emotions, and states of mind indirectly
7	Who wrote novels such as The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller?	Henry James
8	What did Conrad establish in the modern novel?	Psychological depth, narrative complexity, and moral ambiguity
9	Why was D.H. Lawrence’s novels considered obscene?	Because of their frank depiction of relationships and sex
10	Which technique is used by both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf?	Stream-of-consciousness
11	Who were the Trench poets?	Trench poets were poets who wrote about experiences of WWI
12	Which poet discussed god, nature and humankind?	Gerard Manley Hopkins
13	Who were the two prominent modernist poets?	W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot
14	Whose plays use Irish folklore?	J.M. Synge
15	What does the plays of Beckett and Ionesco discuss?	Absurdity or meaninglessness of human life

 

Unit 4: Postmodernism and the Postwar Era

#	Question	Answer
1	What precedes postmodernism?	Modernism
2	What is celebrated in postmodernism?	Loss of faith and order
3	Which Argentinian writer influenced postmodernism?	Jorge Luis Borges
4	Which sub-genre of fiction gained popularity in the postwar era?	Science Fiction
5	Who wrote the novel The Power and the Glory?	Graham Greene
6	Which postwar British novelist explores the human instinct to destroy that which is good?	William Golding
7	What has Orwell contributed to the English language?	Neologisms
8	What is the name of the heroine in The French Lieutenant’s Woman?	Sarah Woodruff
9	Who is the narrator of Waterland?	A History teacher
10	Which historical event is used as a backdrop in Atonement?	World War II
11	What elements are intermixed in magic realism?	Magic/fantasy and realism
12	Who published The Death of a Naturalist?	Seamus Heaney
13	Which British poet uses a wide variety of styles?	George MacBeth
14	Which movement was A. Mitchell part of?	‘Underground Poetry’
15	Where did the Liverpool poets present their poetry?	In clubs and coffee bars
16	Who encouraged ‘community plays’?	Ann Jellicoe
17	What was the name given to John Osborne’s plays?	Kitchen sink drama
18	Who wrote ‘Comedies of Menace’?	Harold Pinter