Solved MCQs of English Literature 10

701. Which social philosophy, dominant during the Industrial Revolution, dictated that only the free operation of economic laws would ensure the general welfare and that the government should not interfere in any person’s pursuit of their personal interests?
a) economic independence
b) the Rights of Man
c) laissez-faire
d) enclosure
e) lazy government

702. What served as the inspiration for P. B. Shelley’s poems to the working classes A Song: “Men of England” and England in 1819?
a) the organization of a working class men’s choral group in Southern England
b) the Battle of Waterloo
c) the Peterloo Massacre
d) the storming of the Bastille
e) the first Reform Bill, passed in 1832, which aimed to bring greater Parliamentary representation to the working classes

703. Who applied the term “Romantic” to the literary period dating from 1785 to 1830?
a) Wordsworth because he wanted to distinguish his poetry and the poetry of his friends from that of the ancien régime, especially satire
b) English historians half a century after the period ended
c) “The Satanic School” of Byron, Percy Shelley, and their followers
d) Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village (1770)
e) Harold Bloom

704. Which poets collaborated on the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, thus demonstrating the “spirit of the age,” which, in an era of revolutionary thinking, depended on a belief in the limitless possibilities of the poetic imagination?
a) Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake
b) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy B. Shelley
c) William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
d) Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt
e) Dorothy Wordsworth and Sally Ashburner

705. Which of the following became the most popular Romantic poetic form, following on Wordsworth’s claim that poetic inspiration is contained within the inner feelings of the individual poet as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”?
a) the lyric poem written in the first person
b) the sonnet
c) doggerel rhyme
d) the political tract
e) the ode

706. Romantic poetry about the natural world uses descriptions of nature _________.
a) for their own sake; to merely describe natural phenomenon
b) to depict a metaphysical concept of nature by endowing it with traits normally associated with humans
c) as a means to demonstrate and discuss the processes of human thinking
d) symbolically to suggest that natural objects correspond to an inner, spiritual world
e) b, c, and d

707. How would “Natural Supernaturalism” be best characterized as a Romantic notion introduced by Carlyle?
a) a form of animism in which objects in the natural world are believed to be inhabited by spirits
b) a spontaneous belief in the supernatural based upon a surprise encounter with a supernatural being
c) a process by which things that are familiar and thought to be ordinary are made to appear miraculous and new to our eyes
d) the experience of hallucinating contact with the supernatural world when taking opium
e) an oxymoron that nobody understood and that cannot be explained in the context of a discussion of Romantic literature

708. Which setting could you not imagine a work of Romantic literature employing?
a) a field of daffodils
b) the “Orient”
c) a graveyard
d) a medieval castle
e) All of the above would be appropriate settings for Romantic literature.

709. Which poet asserted in practice and theory the value of representing rustic life and language as well as social outcasts and delinquents not only in pastoral poetry, common before this poet’s time, but also as the major subject and medium for poetry in general?
a) William Blake
b) Alfred Lord Tennyson
c) Samuel Johnson
d) William Wordsworth
e) Mary Wollstonecraft

710. What is the term we now use for what the Romantics called “mesmerism,” one of the “occult” practices that allowed people to explore altered states of consciousness?
a) smoking opium
b) hypnotism
c) psychoanalysis
d) dream interpretation
e) Satanism

711. Romantic poets would have enjoyed, agreed with, and perhaps written about which of the following figures as depicted?
a) Goethe’s Faust in Faust, who is sinful because he attempts to exceed the bounds of human knowledge by making a pact with the devil but is nonetheless redeemed in his striving to break free of the bounds of mortality
b) Icarus, who is killed in attempting to fly because only Gods have the power to fly and mortals must be taught the limitations of human existence
c) Prometheus, who succeeds in stealing fire from the Gods and thereby surpasses the limitations placed on humans by the Gods
d) all of the above
e) a and c only: Romantics were more interested in representations of humans as they were able to exceed their human limitations.

712. Which of the following best describes the sort of language and tone most often used when Romantic writers discuss the French Revolution?
a) snide indifference
b) biblical reverence
c) condemning censure
d) satirical derision
e) none of the above: Romantic writers had no interest in the French Revolution.

713. Which of the following descriptions would not have applied to any Romantic text?
a) a spiritual autobiography written in an epic style
b) a lyric poem written in the first person
c) a comedy of manners
d) a political tract demanding labor reform
e) a novel written about the intellectual and emotional development of a monster created by a scientist

714. Which of the following poems describe or celebrate an apocalyptic regeneration of humanity and the world effected by the creative capacity of the human mind?
a) Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode
b) Blake’s “Prophetic Books”
c) Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus
d) Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman
e) all but d

715. Which sorts of political reform took place during the Romantic period?

a) Parliamentary reform, increasing representation of the working classes
b) Labor reform, improving working conditions for industrial laborers
c) Voting reform, extending suffrage to men and women
d) Educational reform, producing a dramatic increase in literacy
e) a and d only: Significant labor and voting reform would have to wait for the Victorian era and later.

716. Which of the following factors contributed to literature becoming a profitable business?
a) Commercial and public lending libraries were established in order to provide for an enlarged reading public.
b) Education reform increased literacy, thus creating a demand for commercial and public lending libraries.
c) A new aesthetics of valuing literature for its own sake emphasized reading for pleasure.
d) People had more leisure time to read and more disposable income to spend on reading materials.
e) all of the above

717. Which of the following periodical publications (reviews and magazines) appeared in the Romantic era?
a) London Magazine
b) The Spectator
c) The Edinburgh Review
d) The Tatler
e) a and c only

718. According to a theater licensing act, repealed in 1843, what was meant by “legitimate” drama?
a) The dramaturge and playwright had to be related.
b) All of the actors were male.
c) All of the actors were British.
d) The play was spoken.
e) The play had to be a full musical or produced in full pantomime.

719. The Gothic novel, a popular genre for the Romantics, exemplified in the writing of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, could contain which of the following elements?
a) supernatural phenomenon
b) perversion and sadism, often involving a maiden’s persecution
c) plots of mystery and terror set in inhospitable, sullen landscapes
d) secret passages, decaying mansions, gloomy castles, and dark dungeons
e) all of the above

720. Given the popularity of the Gothic novel and the novel of purpose, which of the following novelists wrote fiction that is closer in subject matter to the novel of manners than it is to the writing of her own era?
a) Fanny Burney
b) Mary Wollstonecraft
c) Anna Letitia Barbauld
d) Jane Austen
e) Mary Shelley

721. Which two writers can be described as writing historical novels?
a) Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley
b) William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
c) Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth
d) Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë
e) none of the above: Romantic novelists never wrote historical novels.

722. Which of the following texts addresses class as a social and economic reality?
a) William Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Political Justice
b) Percy Bysshe Shelley’s England in 1819
c) William Godwin’s Caleb Williams
d) Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian
e) all of the above

723. Which Romantic writer(s) wrote in more than one of these popular literary forms: essay, novel, drama, poetry?
a) Percy Bysshe Shelley
b) William Wordsworth
c) George Gordon, Lord Byron
d) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
e) all of the above

724. Which of the following would not have been an appropriate protagonist for a Romantic literary text?
a) a French revolutionary
b) a Greek or Roman mythological figure
c) a monster fabricated in a laboratory
d) a vagrant, gypsy, or any other itinerant social outcast
e) All would have been appropriate protagonists for a Romantic literary text.

725. In which of the following works is the social outcast represented and addressed?

a) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
b) William Worsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
c) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
d) John Keats’s “To Autumn”
e) all but d

726. Looking to the ancient past, many Romantic poets identified with the figure of the

a) troubadour
b) skald
c) chorister
d) minstrel
e) bard

727. What did Byron deride with his scathing reference to “‘Peddlers,’ and ‘Boats,’ and ‘Wagons’!”?

a) the neo-classical influence of Pope and Dryden
b) the clumsiness of Shakespeare’s plots
c) the Orientalist fantasies of Coleridge
d) Wordsworth’s devotion to the ordinary and everyday
e) Blake’s apocalyptic visions

728. Wordsworth described all good poetry as

a) the rhythmic expression of moral intuition
b) the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
c) the polite patter of a corrupted age
d) the divine gift of grace
e) the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

729. Which poet asserted in practice and theory the value of representing rustic life and language as well as social outcasts and delinquents not only in pastoral poetry, common before this poet’s time, but also as the major subject and medium for poetry in general?

a) William Blake
b) Alfred Lord Tennyson
c) Samuel Johnson
d) William Wordsworth
e) Mary Wollstonecraft

730. Which of the following was a typically Romantic means of achieving visionary states?
a) opium
b) dreams
c) childhood
d) a and b
e) a, b and c

731. Which philosopher had a particular influence on Coleridge?

a) Aristotle
b) Duns Scotus
c) David Hume
d) Immanuel Kant
e) Bertrand Russell

732. Which of the following was not considered a type of the alienated, romantic visionary?

a) Prometheus
b) Satan
c) Cain
d) Napoleon
e) George III

733. Who remained without the vote following the Reform Bill of 1832?

a) about half of middle class men
b) almost all working class men

c) all women
d) b and c
e) a, b and c

734. Which of the following charges were commonly leveled at the novel by its detractors at the dawn of the Romantic era?

a) Too many of its readers were women.
b) It required less skill than other genres.
c) It lacked the classical pedigree of poetry and drama.
d) Too many of its authors were women.
e) all of the above

735. Which chilling novel of surveillance and entrapment had the alternative title Things as They Are?

a) Jane Austen’s Emma
b) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
c) William Godwin’s Caleb Williams
d) Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley
e) Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto

736. Which of the following is a typically Romantic poetic form?

a) the fractal
b) the figment
c) the fragment
d) the aubade
e) the comedy of manners

737. Who exemplified the role of the “peasant poet”?

a) John Clare
b) John Keats
c) Robert Burns
d) a and c only
e) b and c only

738. Who in the Romantic period developed a new novelistic language for the workings of the mind in flux?

a) Maria Edgeworth
b) Sir Walter Scott
c) Thomas De Quincey
d) Joanna Baillie
e) Jane Austen

739. Which ruler’s reign marks the approximate beginning and end of the Victorian era?

a) King Henry VIII
b) Queen Elizabeth I
c) Queen Victoria
d) King John
e) all of the above, in that order, with Victoria’s reign marking the most pivotal period for England’s colonial efforts in India, Africa, and the West Indies

740. Which city became the perceived center of Western civilization by the middle of the nineteenth century?
a) Paris
b) Tokyo
c) London
d) Amsterdam
e) New York

741. By 1890, what percentage of the earth’s population was subject to Queen Victoria?

a) 1%
b) 10%
c) 15%
d) 25%
e) 95%

742. What did Thomas Carlyle mean by “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe”?

a) Britain’s preeminence as a global power will depend on mastery of foreign languages.
b) Even a foreign author is better than a homegrown scoundrel.
c) Abandon the introspection of the Romantics and turn to the higher moral purpose found in Goethe.
d) In a carefully veiled critique of the monarchy, Byron and Goethe stand in symbolically for Queen Victoria and Charles Darwin respectively.
e) Leave England and emigrate to Germany.

743. To whom did the Reform Bill of 1832 extend the vote on parliamentary representation?

a) the working classes
b) women
c) the lower middle classes
d) slaves
e) conservative landowners

744. Elizabeth Barrett’s poem The Cry of the Children is concerned with which major issue attendant on the Time of Troubles during the 1830s and 1840s?

a) women’s rights and suffrage
b) child labor
c) Chartism
d) the prudishness and old-fashioned ideals of her fellow Victorians
e) insurrection in the colonies

745. Who were the “Two Nations” referred to in the subtitle of Disraeli’s Sybil (1845)?

a) the rich and the poor
b) Anglicans and Methodists
c) England and Ireland
d) Britain and Germany
e) the industrial north and the agrarian south

746. Which of the following novelists best represents the mid-Victorian period’s contentment with the burgeoning economic prosperity and decreased restiveness over social and political change?

a) Anthony Trollope
b) Charles Dickens
c) John Ruskin
d) Friedrich Engels
e) Oscar Wilde

747. Which event did not occur as part of the rise of the British Empire under Queen Victoria?

a) Between 1853 and 1880, 2,466,000 emigrants left Britain, many bound for the colonies.
b) In 1876, Queen Victoria was named empress of India.
c) To save costs and maximize profits, the day-to-day government of India was transferred from Parliament to the private East India Company.
d) From 1830 to 1870, the sum total of investments abroad by British capitalists had risen from £300 billion to £800 billion.
e) In 1867 the Canadian provinces were unified into the Dominion of Canada.

748. What does the phrase “White Man’s Burden,” coined by Kipling, refer to?

a) Britain’s manifest destiny to colonize the world
b) the moral responsibility to bring civilization and Christianity to the peoples of the world
c) the British need to improve technology and transportation in other parts of the world
d) the importance of solving economic and social problems in England before tackling the world’s problems
e) a Chartist sentiment

749. Which of the following best defines Utilitarianism?

a) a farming technique aimed at maximizing productivity with the fewest tools
b) a moral arithmetic, which states that all humans aim to maximize the greatest pleasure to the greatest number
c) a critical methodology stating that all words have a single meaningful function within a given piece of literature
d) a philosophy dictating that we should only keep what we use on a daily basis.
e) a form of nonconformism

750. Which of the following discoveries, theories, and events contributed to Victorians feeling less like they were a uniquely special, central species in the universe and more isolated?

a) geology
b) evolution
c) discoveries in astronomy about stellar distances
d) all of the above
e) tractarianism

751. Which of the following contributed to the growing awareness in the Late Victorian Period of the immense human, economic, and political costs of running an empire?

a) the India Mutiny in 1857
b) the Boer War in the south of Africa
c) the Jamaica Rebellion in 1865
d) the Irish Question
e) all of the above

752. Which of the following authors promoted versions of socialism?

a) William Morris
b) John Ruskin
c) Edward FitzGerald
d) Karl Marx
e) all but c

753. Which best describes the general feeling expressed in literature during the last decade of the Victorian era?

a) studied melancholy and aestheticism
b) sincere earnestness and Protestant zeal
c) raucous celebration mixed with self-congratulatory sophistication
d) paranoid introspection and cryptic dissent
e) all of the above

754. Which of the following acts were not passed during the Victorian era?

a) a series of Factory Acts
b) the Custody Act
c) the Women’s Suffrage Act
d) the Married Women’s Property Rights Acts
e) the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act

755. Which contemporary discussions on women’s rights did Tennyson’s The Princess address?

a) the grueling working conditions for women in textile factories
b) the debate on women’s suffrage
c) the need to enlarge and improve educational opportunities for women, resulting in the establishment of the first women’s college in London
d) the question of monarchical succession and if a woman should hold royal power
e) the establishment of a civil divorce court

756. Fill in the blanks from Tennyson’s The Princess.
Man for the field and woman for the _____:
Man for the sword and for the _____ she:
Man with the head and woman with the _____:
Man to command and woman to _____.

a) crop; scabbard; foot; agree
b) throne; scepter; soul; decree
c) school; scalpel; pen; set free
d) hearth; needle; heart; obey
e) field; sword; head; command

757. Which of the following Victorian writers regularly published their work in periodicals?

a) Thomas Carlyle
b) Matthew Arnold
c) Charles Dickens
d) Elizabeth Barrett Browning
e) all of the above: (In addition to short fiction, most Victorian novels appeared serialized in periodicals.)

758. What best describes the subject of most Victorian novels?

a) the representation of a large and comprehensive social world in realistic detail
b) a surrealist exploration of alternate states of consciousness
c) a mythic dream world
d) the attempt of a protagonist to define his or her place in society
e) a and d

759. Why did the novel seem a genre particularly well-suited to women?

a) It did not carry the burden of an august tradition like poetry.
b) It was a popular form whose market women could enter easily.
c) It was seen as a frivolous form where one shouldn’t make serious statements about society.
d) It often concerned the domestic world with which women were familiar.
e) all but c

760. What was the relationship between Victorian poets and the Romantics?

a) The Romantics remained largely forgotten until their rediscovery by T. S. Eliot in the 1920s.
b) The Victorians were disgusted by the immorality and narcissism of the Romantics.
c) The Romantics were seen as gifted but crude artists belonging to a distant, semi-barbarous age.
d) The Victorians were strongly influenced by the Romantics and experienced a sense of belatedness.
e) The Victorians were aware of no distinction between themselves and the Romantics; the distinction was only created by critics in the twentieth century.

761. Experimentation in which of the following areas of poetic expression characterize Victorian poetry and allow Victorian poets to represent psychology in a different way?

a) the use of pictorial description to construct visual images to represent the emotion or situation of the poem
b) sound as a means to express meaning
c) perspective, as in the dramatic monologue
d) all of the above
e) none of the above: Victorians were not experimental in their poetry.

763. What factors contributed to the increased popularity of nonfiction prose?

a) a new market position for nonfiction writing and an exalted sense of the didactic function of the writer
b) a Puritanical distrust of fictions and a thirst for trivia
c) the forbiddingly high cost of three-volume novels and the difficulty of finding poetry in bookshops outside of London
d) the deconstruction of the truth-fiction dichotomy and an accompanying relativistic sense that every opinion was of equal value
e) c and d

764. For what do Matthew Arnold’s moral investment in nonfiction and Walter Pater’s aesthetic investment together pave the way?

a) a renewed secularism in the twentieth century
b) modern literary criticism
c) late–nineteenth-century and early–twentieth-century satirical drama
d) the surrealist movement
e) none of the above: Victorian prose was mostly forgotten until recently and had little impact on literature of or after its time.

765. Which of the following comic playwrights made fun of Victorian values and pretensions?

a) W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
b) Oscar Wilde
c) George Bernard Shaw
d) Robert Corrigan
e) all but d

20th Century

766. Which of the following phrases best characterizes the late-nineteenth century aesthetic movement which widened the breach between artists and the reading public, sowing the seeds of modernism?

a) art for intellect’s sake
b) art for God’s sake
c) art for the masses
d) art for art’s sake
e) art for sale

767. What was the impact on literature of the Education Act of 1870, which made elementary schooling compulsory?

a) the emergence of a mass literate population at whom a new mass-produced literature could be directed
b) a new market for basic textbooks which paid better than sophisticated novels or plays
c) a popular thirst for the “classics,” driving contemporary writers to the margins
d) a, b and c
e) none of the above

768. Which text exemplifies the anti-Victorianism prevalent in the early twentieth century?

a) Eminent Victorians
b) Jungle Books
c) Philistine Victorians
d) The Way of All Flesh
e) both a and d

769. With which enormously influential perspective or practice is the early-twentieth-century thinker Sigmund Freud associated?

a) eugenics
b) psychoanalysis
c) phrenology
d) anarchism
e) all of the above

770. Which thinker had a major impact on early-twentieth-century writers, leading them to re-imagine human identity in radically new ways?

a) Sigmund Freud
b) Sir James Frazer
c) Immanuel Kant
d) Friedrich Nietzsche
e) all but c

771. Which scientific or technological advance did not take place in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century?

a) Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity
b) wireless communication across the Atlantic
c) the creation of the internet
d) the invention of the airplane
e) the mass production of cars

772. Which best describes the imagist movement, exemplified in the work of T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound?

a) a poetic aesthetic vainly concerned with the way words appear on the page
b) an effort to rid poetry of romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism, replacing it with a precision and clarity of imagery
c) an attention to alternate states of consciousness and uncanny imagery
d) the resurrection of Romantic poetic sensibility
e) a neo-platonic poetics that stresses the importance of poetry aiming to achieve its ideal “form”

773. What characteristics of seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry sparked the enthusiasm of modernist poets and critics?

a) its intellectual complexity
b) its union of thought and passion
c) its uncompromising engagement with politics
d) a and b
e) a,b, and c

774. In the 1930s, younger writers such as W. H. Auden were more _______ but less _______ than older modernists such as Eliot and Pound.

a) popular; reverenced
b) brash; confident
c) radical; inventive
d) anxious; haunting
e) spiritual; orthodox

775. Which poet could be described as part of “The Movement” of the 1950s?

a) Thom Gunn
b) Dylan Thomas
c) Pablo Picasso
d) Philip Larkin
e) both a and d

776. Which British dominion achieved independence in 1921-22, following the Easter Rising of 1916?

a) the southern counties of Ireland
b) Canada
c) Ulster
d) India
e) Ghana

777. Which of the following writers did not come from Ireland?

a) W. B. Yeats
b) James Joyce
c) Seamus Heaney
d) Oscar Wilde
e) none of the above; all came from Ireland

778. Which phrase indicates the interior flow of thought employed in high-modern literature?

a) automatic writing
b) confused daze
c) total recall
d) stream of consciousness
e) free association

779. Which of the following is not associated with high modernism in the novel?

a) stream of consciousness
b) free indirect style
c) irresolute open endings
d) the “mythical method”
e) narrative realism

780. Which novel did T. S. Eliot praise for utilizing a new “mythical method” in place of the old “narrative method” and demonstrates the use of ancient mythology in modernist fiction to think about “making the modern world possible for art”?
a) Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
b) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
c) James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake
d) E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
e) James Joyce’s Ulysses

781. Who wrote the dystopian novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four in which Newspeak demonstrates the heightened linguistic self-consciousness of modernist writers?
a) George Orwell
b) Virginia Woolf
c) Evelyn Waugh
d) Orson Wells
e) Aldous Huxley

782. Which of the following novels display postwar nostalgia for past imperial glory?
a) E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
b) Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
c) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
d) Paul Scott’s Staying On
e) c and d

783. When was the ban finally lifted on D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written in 1928.
a) 1930
b) 1945
c) 1960
d) 2000
e) The ban has not yet been formally lifted.

Solved MCQs of English Literature 9