UGC NET Paper 2: English 26th June 2019 (Previous Year Paper)

The correct answer is ‘Daniel Jones’.

Key Points

• Cardinal vowels are a group of reference vowels which are used to describe the sounds of languages by phoneticians.
• They are classified according to the relative position of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, how forward or back the highest point of the tongue is, and the position of the lips.
• A cardinal vowel is a vowel sound which is produced when the tongue is in an extreme high or low, front or back position.
• Daniel Jones (1881-1967) was a British phonetician who established and systematized the concept of cardinal vowels.
• However, the idea of cardinal vowels goes back to earlier phoneticians like Ellis and Bell.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

Additional Information 

• Albert Sidney Hornby (1898-1978) was an English grammarian, lexicographer as well as a pioneer in the field of English language learning and teaching.
• Edward Verrall Lucas (1868-1938) was an English humorist, playwright, biographer, publisher, editor, novelist and poet.
• C.J. Dodson is known for developing the bilingual method of foreign language teaching in 1967.

The correct answer is ‘Stephen Greenblatt’.

Key Points 

• Stephen Greenblatt is an author, academic and literary historian, who is regarded as one of the founders of New Historicism.
• New Historicism is a set of critical practices, which he describes using the term ‘cultural poetics’.
• New Historicism is a literary theory which places importance on the historical context of a literary text as well as its critic in the study of literature.
• Greenblatt is a key figure in the field known as New Historicism, a practice that examines literature in its historical context and treats the literary text and its milieu as a dynamic interaction.
• In addition to the influence which an author’s historical context exerts upon on a literary text, New Historicism also believes that any understanding of a literary text is equally coloured by a critic’s social status, beliefs and background.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 1.

Additional Information 

• Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who is best remembered for his collection of essays titled The Dialogic Imagination, 1981.
• Jonathan Dollimore (born 1948) is a British philosopher, academic and literary critic, best remembered for his contributions to the field of Renaissance literature.
• Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was a Marxist academic, writer and literary critic, best remembered for his contributions to the field of cultural studies.

The correct answer is ‘A pre-publication process in which work submitted for publication is evaluated for quality by experts in the field’.

Key Points 

• Peer review is a process by which a research paper is submitted to leading experts in a particular field to check for quality and academic rigour before it is published.
• It is a pre-publication process.
• A peer review checks quality and accuracy of the research.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

The correct answer is ‘The material effect that culture has in wider social life’.

Key Points 

• Raymond Williams coined the term ‘Cultural Materialism’.
• He extends the scope of historical materialism to the realm of culture, arts and literature.
• Cultural Materialism is a concept which looks at culture as a productive process.
• Cultural materialism, therefore, refers to the material effect that culture has in our wider social lives.
• In a 1958 essay, ‘‘Culture is Ordinary’’, Williams illustrates how we experience culture everyday in the ordinary aspects of daily life.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

Important Points 

• Raymond Williams (1921-1988) is a Marxist author, academic and literary critic.
• He is one of the key figures of the New Left.
• Some of his best known works include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973), and Marxism and Literature (1977).
• His work has greatly influenced cultural studies.

The correct answer is ‘Banishment of poets from the republic’.

Key Points 

• In Books III and X of The Republic, Plato deals with the problem of poets.
• According to Plato, the tragic poet is an imitator of the world.
• Therefore, like all imitators, he is thrice removed from the truth.
• Poets corrupt the youth by inciting passions instead of the faculty of reason.
• Therefore, Plato concludes that poets must be banished from the hypothetical ideal society.
• In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote an essay titled ‘‘In Defence of Poetry’’.
• The essay was penned in response to Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘‘The Four Ages of Poetry’’.
• In his defence of poetry, Shelley writes, ‘‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’’.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 1.

The correct answer is "Prior knowledge".

Key Points

• Prior knowledge is information that a student already knows before receiving new information.
• Activating prior information before tackling a material can help learners better understand it, and creating this practice is beneficial for their learner development.

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 1.

The correct answer is ‘The introduction of English as the medium of instruction in a Western system of education that included literature, natural sciences and mechanical inventions’.

Key Points 

• Charles Grant (1746-1823) was a British politician who served as the Chairman of the East India Company.
• In 1792, he wrote a paper titled Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain particular with respect to Morals; and on the means of improving it.
• In this paper, he made a number of recommendations towards the welfare of Indians.
• He also recommended the introduction of English as the medium of instruction following a Western system of education, which included literature, natural sciences and mechanical inventions.
• Charles Grant believed that an English education imparted by Christian missionaries was the only way to liberate India from moral and social evils like the caste system, corruption and superstitions of the people.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

The correct answer is "Komoidia, revel-song".

Key Points

• The term "comedy" is derived from the Classical Greek komoida, which is a composite of the words kômos (revel) and oide (singing).
• Comedy is a literary genre and a form of dramatic work that is lighthearted and satirical in tone, with a happy ending.
• The theme of this theatrical work is triumph over adversity by the use of humorous effects, culminating in a happy or triumphant conclusion.
• Ancient Greek comedy was one of the last three major theatrical forms of classical Greek theater (the others being tragedy and the satyr play).
• Conventionally, Athenian comedy is divided into three periods: Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy.​

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

Important Points

• Situational Comic: Also known as a sitcom, it consists of a comedy play and characters who appear in episodes one after the other.
• Romantic Comedy: A comedic subgenre with cheerful themes and hilarious plots.
• Dark Comedy: Also known as dark humor, black humor, or black comedy, dark comedy; it lightens up heavy or serious matters and themes with humorous remarks.
• Farce: This type of comedy exaggerates the circumstance.
• Spoof or parody: This type of comedy uses imitation to mock or ironize real-life occurrences.
• Satire: Satire mocks vices, follies, and foibles in order to remedy them.
• Dramatic Irony: Its goal is to apply irony in dramatic situations or through theatre.
• Tragicomedy: Its goal is to make tragic circumstances appear lighter by combining tragedy and comedy.

The correct option is "Imaginary stage"

Key Points

• Jacques Lacan proposed that our subjective experience is contextualized with regard to how phenomena become registered in the mind.
• He proposed that "The Psyche" can be divided into three major structures that control our lives and our desires. They are The Real, The Imaginary and The Symbolic Order.
• The Real is fundamentally a derivative of our senses.
• The Imaginary is derived from perceptual and fantasied mental processes. This concept corresponds to the mirror stage and marks the movement of the subject from primal need to what Lacan terms "demand."
• The Symbolic is derived from culture and through language.
• The mirror stage occurs roughly between the ages of six and 18 months and corresponds to Freud’s stage of primary narcissism. That is the stage of human development when the subject is in love with the image of themselves and their own bodies and which precedes the love of others.
• Once a child begins to recognize that its body is separate from the world and its mother in the Imaginary state, it begins to feel anxiety, which is caused by a sense of something lost. The demand of the child, then, is to make the other a part of itself, as it seemed to be in the child's now lost state of nature.

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 2.

The correct answer is ‘Edmund Kean’.

Key Points 

• The above remark was made about Edmund Kean by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
• Edmund Kean (1787-1833) was a renowned Shakespearean stage actor from England.
• Kean appeared in many major plays by Shakespeare like Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear.
• He gained much fame as an actor after joining the Drury Theatre Group in 1814.
• His last appearance was as Othello at Covent Garden in 1833.
• ‘‘To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’’, Coleridge said in praise of Kean.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 4.

Additional Information 

• David Garrick (1717-1779) was an English actor, playwright and producer who greatly influenced European theatre in the eighteenth century.
• Richard Burbage (1567-1619) is known to have been one of the most popular actors of the Globe Theatre.
• John Philip Kemble (1757-1823) was an English actor associated with the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

The correct answer is "Institutionalisation".

Key Points

• Ziauddin Sardar is a British-Pakistani scholar, author, cultural critic, and public intellectual who specializes in Muslim philosophy, the future of Islam, futurology and science, and cultural connections.
• The process of integrating a notion within an organization, social structure, or society as a whole is known as institutionalisation. Committing a specific individual or group to an institution, such as a mental or welfare institution, is another use of the phrase.
• The role of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge are among its core themes.
• Cultural Studies deals with the complexities of daily life and how habits, texts, objects, and beliefs are socially patterned and filled with values and significance.
• It aims at providing a variety of tools for analyzing how cultural practices and meanings are created, circulated, and traded.​

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

Important Points

• Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the political dynamics of modern culture (including popular culture) as well as its historical roots.
• Researchers in cultural studies often explore how cultural practices link to larger systems of power that are related with, or operate through, social phenomena. Ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation are examples of these.
• Cultural studies was founded in the late 1960s, and 1970s by British Marxist academics, and it has since been adopted and altered by researchers from many different fields all over the world.
• Stuart Hall's pioneering work at the Center for Contemporary Culture Studies began in 1964, following the release of the founding texts of British Cultural Studies in the late 1950s (CCCS).​

Additional Information

• Devolution is the statutory delegation of functions from a sovereign state's central government to govern at a subnational level, such as regional or local.
• Displacement is a fundamental concept and issue found in both postcolonial and modern literature. As a critical concept, it seeks to analyze the identity crisis caused by colonialism or modernism.
• Dissent is defined as an opinion, philosophy, or feeling of disagreement or opposition to a dominant ideology or policy imposed by a government, political party, or other body or individual.

The correct option is "W. W. Greg"

Key Points

• "The Rationale of Copy-Text" is by Sir Walter Wilson Greg.
• Sir Walter Wilson Greg was born in 1875 at Wimbledon Common, southwest London.
• He was one of the leading bibliographers and Shakespeare scholars of the 20^th century.
• Sir Walter W Greg's 1950 essay "The Rationale of Copy-Text" proved conducive for Anglo-American textual criticism in the last half of the 20^th century.
• He joined the Bibliographical Society and was President of the Society from 1930 to 1932. He also received its Gold Medal in 1935.
• Sir Walter Wilson Greg died in 1959.

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 2.

The correct answer is "Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer".

Key Points

• George Orwell's 1940 article "Inside the Whale," which was split into three sections, is a critique of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
• Tropic of Cancer is praised by Orwell for accurately capturing the filthy daily concerns and flutters that plague the majority of people's minds without any glitz or political overtones. Its main character spends his time scrounging for food, getting wasted, and caging money.​

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 1.

Important Points

• George Orwell, a pen name for Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic.
• Lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to tyranny, and support for democratic socialism are traits of his writing.
• Animal Farm, a comedy that allegorically described Joseph Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, a stark warning against dictatorship, are two of George Orwell's highly influential books.​

Additional Information

• The modernist book Ulysses was written by Irish author James Joyce. From March 1918 until December 1920, portions of it were serialized in the American periodical The Little Review. On February 2, 1922—Joyce's 40^th birthday—Sylvia Beach published the full work in Paris.
• The final book written by English author D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was privately released in 1928 in Italy and 1929 in France.
• Anas Nin's collection of fifteen short stories, Delta of Venus, was written in the 1940s as erotica for a private collector. It was published posthumously in 1977.

The correct option is "Capital letters, exclamation marks, phrases in German"

Key Points

• Thomas Carlyle was born in December 1795 in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire
• Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher.
• He was the leading writer of the Victorian era, he exerted a profound influence on 19^th-century art, literature, and philosophy.
• Considered one of the most important social commentators of his time, he presented many lectures during his lifetime with certain acclaim in the Victorian Era.
• Carlyle takes full advantage of punctuation, using exclamation marks or question marks in almost every other sentence. He uses scare quotes and italics and capital letters to give importance or emotion to his words.

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 1.

The correct answer is "There are some initial moral concerns in Virgil.".

Key Points

• In his essay Virgil and the Christian World, Eliot wrote " I instinctively prefer the world of Virgil to the world of Homer because it was a more civilized world of dignity, reason and order. When I say the "world of Virgil", I mean what Virgil himself made of the world in which he lived."
• Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, also known as Virgil, lived during the Augustan era in antiquity. The Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid are three of the most well-known poems in Latin literature written by him.
• The Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that serve as cornerstones of classical Greek literature, are attributed to the Greek poet Homer. Homer is considered one of history's most revered and influential writers.​​

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 1.

Important Points

• Thomas Stearns Eliot was a dramatist, publisher, essayist, literary critic, editor, and poet.
• He is a key character in English Modernist poetry and is regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century.
• Eliot originally gained worldwide recognition with his 1915 poetry "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which was seen as outrageous at the time of its release. The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets(1943).
• Additionally, he was well-known for seven plays, including The Cocktail Party (1949) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
• The 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature was given to him "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."

The correct option is "Creole"

Key Points

• The vernacular languages that developed in colonial European plantation settlements in the 17^th and 18^th centuries as a result of contact between groups that spoke mutually unintelligible languages are known as creole languages.
• Creole languages most often emerged in colonies located near the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean or the Indian Ocean.
• Most commonly, creoles have resulted from the interactions between speakers of nonstandard varieties of European languages and speakers of non-European languages.
• Creole languages include varieties that are based on French, such as Haitian Creole, Louisiana Creole, and Mauritian Creole.
• A pidgin arises when speakers of two different languages encounter one another and need a limited communication. The pidgin incorporates words from both source languages and has a simplified grammatical structure, just enough to allow communication for some limited purpose.

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 1.

The correct answer is "1800".

Key Points

• The Romantic Age began with the 1798 release of Lyrical Ballads, written by Wordsworth with S T Coleridge's assistance.
• Wordsworth wrote a preface to the second edition in 1800 that was based on the rules of poetry.
• Wordsworth added an appendix titled Poetic Diction to the third edition, which was released in 1802 and elucidated the poetic ideas described in the introduction.​

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

Important Points​

• While it had a little immediate impact on critics, it went on to become and remain a turning point in English poetry and literature.
• By using verse written in the commonplace language, Wordsworth and Coleridge aimed to dismantle the priggish, erudite, and highly sculpted forms of 18^th-century English poetry and make poetry approachable to the general public.
• The vibrancy of the living voice employed by the destitute to communicate their reality is emphasized by these two influential poets. This language also supports the idea that all human emotions are universal.

The correct answer is ‘Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is not the correct explanation of (A)’.

Key Points 

• Dialect refers to a variety of language which is characteristically spoken by a particular group of people.
• There can be different dialects or varieties of a language.
• The dialects of a particular language are closely related despite their differences across regions, classes or ethnic groups.
• Dialects may differ in grammar, spelling, pronunciation and vocabulary.
• However, they are largely mutually intelligible.
• Hence, the Germanic dialects of English like Dutch, English, German, Swedish, and others have not acquired the status of languages, being mutually intelligible varieties of English.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

The correct answer is ‘grammar, logic, rhetoric’.

Key Points 

• The study of liberal arts in medieval European universities was divided into seven systems.
• These are known as the ‘trivium’ and ‘quadrivium’ respectively.
• The trivium comprises the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
• The quadrivium comprises the study of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
• The trivium and the quadrivium imparted to the student an education in the seven liberal arts prized in classical antiquity.
• Etymologically, ‘trivium’ is a Latin word which means the place where three roads converge.
• The subjects which comprise the trivium are the taken to be the foundation for the quadrivium.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 4.

The correct answer is ‘Resources of Hope’.

Key Points 

• This statement is taken from an essay titled ‘‘Culture is Ordinary’’ by the Welsh Marxist writer and academic Raymond Williams.
• The essay was published in the book of essays Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism by Verso Books in 1989.
• The book includes a number of influential essays by the author, like ‘‘What is Culture?’’, ‘‘Welsh Culture’’, ‘‘The British Left’’, and ‘‘Why Do I Demonstrate?’’
• It brings together essays on themes of culture, community, Green socialism, the threat of nuclear warfare, and the relationship between the state and the arts.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

Additional Information 

• The Country and the City is a book which analyses the representation of the country and the city in literature by Raymond Williams, originally published in 1973.
• The Long Revolution (1961) by Raymond Williams analyses the revolution in culture which accompanied the democratic and industrial revolution.
• Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is a book by Raymond Williams, originally published in 1976.

The correct answer is "A - 3, B - 1, C - 4, D - 2".

Key Points

• Farce is a type of comedy in the literary genre. It is a subcategory of dramatic comedy that uses improbable, humorous situations, extensive exaggeration, and violent physical humor to entertain the audience. Dramatic farcical comedy uses physical comedy, silliness, rude humor, and absurdity with the main purpose of making the audience laugh. Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (1594) and Oscar Widle’s The Importance of Being Earnest(1895) are examples of a farce.
• Props are objects used on stage or on screen by actors during a performance or screen production. In practical terms, a prop is considered to be anything movable or portable on a stage or a set, distinct from the actors, scenery, costumes, and electrical equipment.
• Closet drama is a drama in written form that does not rely upon improving stage direction and is only intended to be read and not to be performed on stage. They feature high thinking, philosophic and rhetorical ideas, less dramatic techniques, and less action. The dialogues were wrapped in the philosophy that Greek and Roman writers such as Plato used. It gave more thoughtful provocation to readers without visual representation. John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (three parts, 1903–08) are examples of closet dramas.
• Music hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment that was popular from the early Victorian era, beginning around 1850. Members of the public flocked to theatres around the country to sing along to favorite popular songs, or watch entertainments as diverse as acrobats, trapeze artists, ‘operatic selections’, ‘black-face minstrels’, or can-can dancers.

Therefore, the correct option is option 2.

The correct answer is ‘Abraham Lincoln’.

Key Points 

• O Captain! My Captain! is a poem by Walt Whitman, first published in 1865 in The Saturday Press.
• The poem was composed on the death of American President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated in 1865.
• This is one of the four poems composed by the poet on the death of Abraham Lincoln.
• The others include “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’’, ‘‘Hush’d Be the Camps To-day’’, and ‘‘This Dust was Once the Man’’.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 4.

Important Points 

• Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a poet, essayist and journalist from the United States of America.
• He used free verse extensively in his poetry.
• He is best remembered for his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855.

Additional Information 

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American poet, philosopher and abolitionist who played a leading role in the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19^th century.
• John Keats (1795-1821) was a second-generation English Romantic poet, best remembered for his odes.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) also belonged to the second-generation of English Romantic poets.

The correct answer is "B and D".

Key Points

• In the case of aspirates (unvoiced) /p/, /t/, /k/ most Indians pronounce them as voiced sounds.
• When letters p, k, t, and k come at the beginning of words, they must be aspired like /ph/, /th/, and /kh/ whereas when they come in the middle or at the end of the words, they are unaspirated. Most Indians pronounce them as voiced sounds irrespective of their places.
• In the system of vowel sounds, Indian English has a simplified vowel system from Standard English pronunciation.
• Like the two vowels of the central row [ə] and [ʌ] do not differ in standard Indian English. And in some dialects, the back vowel [ʌ] is replaced by the front vowel [a].
• Therefore, the correct option is option 2.

The correct answer is Pompous and affected style of writing**.''**

Key Points

• ​Euphuism is an elaborately patterned prose style, characterized in particular by the use of similes and metaphors, parallelism, alliteration, and antithesis.
• The term euphuism (from the Greek, "to grow, bring forth") is derived from the name of the hero in John Lyly's ornately florid Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579).
• Although the style soon fell out of fashion, it played an important role in the development of English prose. It appeared at a time of experimentation with prose styles, and it offered prose that was lighter and more fanciful than previous writing.
• The influence of euphuism can be seen in the works of such writers as Robert Greene and William Shakespeare for example Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love Labour’s Lost, etc.

Therefore, the correct option is option 3.

The correct answer is ‘Chiaroscuro’.

Key Points 

• The artistic technique which best describes the interplay of light and shade in the above lines is known as chiaroscuro.
• Chiaroscuro refers to the treatment of light and shadows in order to create strong contrasts in a composition.
• The above lines are taken from ‘‘Mirror’’, a short poem by Sylvia Plath in two stanzas.
• It was written in 1961, when Sylvia Plath was living in England with her husband and poet Ted Hughes.
• She had already given birth to Frieda, her first child.
• This was a stressful period for Plath, as she worried about the idea of settling down and growing old.
• ‘‘Mirror’’ is an autobiographical poem, written from the perspective of a mirror which is personified in the poem.
• It reflects the poet’s anxieties and fears.
• It may have been influenced by an earlier poem of the same name by James Merrill.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 4.

Additional Information 

• Collage refers to any composition which includes words, phrases, or sections taken from outside source material presented in juxtaposition.
• For example, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land brings together newspaper clippings, nursery rhymes, music lyrics and overheard speech.
• The word montage originates from the French word ‘monter’, which means to create associations of things with each other.
• It is a technique used in films and literature, where a collection of images are assembled together to narrate a story.
• A flashback is a literary device in a film, story or a poem which interrupts the progression of events by taking the reader back in time.

The correct answer is "Phonology - Sound system"​.

Key Points

• Phonology is the study of sound systems.
• It is different from phonetics, as phonetics is the study of actual sounds of human languages, their production, and their perception.

Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

Additional Information

• Semiology or semiotics is the study of sign processes or signification and communication, signs and symbols. It is divided into the three following branches: 
• Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata.
• Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures.
• Pragmatics: Relation between signs and their effects on people who use them.
• ​​Etymology is the branch of linguistics concerned with the history of the forms and meanings of words. 
• Words can be born in many different ways, and frequently their histories are quite fascinating and insightful.
• Every word in every language has a distinct origin and history.
• Etymology examines and records the histories of words, primarily their origins.
• Morphology is the study of the minimal meaningful units of language. It studies the structure of words, however from a semantic viewpoint rather than from the viewpoint of sound.

The correct answer is ‘(a) and (c)’.

Key Points 

• Provocations: The Teaching of English Literature in India is a collection of seminar papers by professors from various varsities and scholars across the country like Sudhakar Marathe and others.
• These papers were presented at a seminar organised at the University of Hyderabad in March 1991.
• The book discusses the relevance and crisis of teaching English literature in India.
• The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India by Rajeswari Sundari Rajan explores the relevance, social functions and institutional contexts of pedagogy and publishing practice in the field of English literary studies in India.
• It was originally published in 1992.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

Additional Information 

• The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge by E.M.W. Tillyard was originally published in 1958.
• Professing Literature by Gerald Graff was originally published in 1987.
• The book explores the history of the rise and development of literary studies in America.

The correct answer is "Hamlet's emotion is not adequately objectified.".

Key Points

• T.S. Eliot claims Shakespeare's Hamlet to be an artistic failure in ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, his most important and influential essays.
• It was first published in 1919, where Eliot makes the bold claim that Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, far from being a triumph, is an artistic failure.
• T.S. Eliot has called it an artistic failure because of the fact that there is a delay on the part of Hamlet in executing the revenge.
• There are many critics who interpret Hamlet in terms of the revenge motif where the prince makes an unnecessary delay and his indecisiveness slows the progress of the action.
• Eliot also uses the phrase 'objective correlative' to describe "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion".
• Eliot writes that Hamlet's state of mind is a direct result of his confused emotions and the lack of external representation of these emotions in an objective correlative.

Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

The correct answer is "Michel Foucault".

Key Points

• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a major figure in two successive waves of 20^th-century French thought–the structuralist wave of the 1960s and then the poststructuralist wave.
• Power relations played a significant role in Michel Foucault's philosophical work. He argued that power is not fundamentally something that institutions own and wield oppressively against people and groups, obviously breaking with Marxist views of power relations.
• Knowledge for Foucault is incomprehensible apart from power, although Foucault continues to insist on the relative autonomy of discourse, introducing the notion of power-knowledge precisely as a replacement for the Marxist notion of ideology in which knowledge is seen as distorted by class power.
• For Foucault, there is no pure knowledge apart from power, but knowledge also has real and irreducible importance for power.
• His notable works are: Madness and Civilization (1961) The Birth of the Clinic (1963) The Order of Things (1966) Discipline and Punish (1975) The History of Sexuality (1976).

​Therefore, the correct option is option 4.

Additional Information

• Louis Althusser was the most influential philosopher to emerge in the revival of Marxist theory occasioned by the radical movements of the 1960s. He is widely known for his best-known essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation.
• Clifford Geertz is an American cultural anthropologist, a leading rhetorician, and a proponent of symbolic anthropology and interpretive anthropology. His major works are The Religion of Java (1960), Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali (1966).
• Jacques Lacan often referred to as “the French Freud,” is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis. His teachings and writings explore the significance of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious both within the theory and practice of analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide range of other disciplines.

The correct answer is ‘Works of art are superior to the nature world they represent’.

Key Points 

• The above lines are taken from An Apology for Poetry by Philip Sydney, an Elizabethan poet, courtier and scholar.
• An Apology for Poetry is a work of literary criticism, published in 1595, after the poet’s death.
• Sydney examines the word for poets in the classical world, vates, which meant ‘seer’ or ‘prophet’ and poietes which means ‘maker’.
• This reflects the fact that poets have the capacity to create new and more beautiful realities using the power of their imagination.
• In the essay, Sydney addresses Plato’s objections to poetry.
• Sydney distinguishes between three general kinds of poetry: religious, philosophical, and imaginative poetry.
• According to Sydney, poetry combines the liveliness of history with the ethical concerns of philosophy, thereby being more effective in inspiring its readers to virtue than either history or philosophy.
• Unlike scholars, who are constrained by nature, the poet has the power to create works of art which are superior to nature by his power of imagination.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 1.

The correct answer is "A - 3, B - 4, C - 1, D - 2".

Key Points

• Image-Music-Text (1977) is an anthology of essays written by the French theorist Roland Barthes and the essays were selected and translated by Stephen Heath.
• It brings together Barthes' structural analysis of narrative and issues in literary theory, the semiotics of photography and film, on the practice of music and voice.
• Why Marx was Right (2011) is a work by Terry Eagleton where he disagrees with the notion that Marxism is no longer relevant.
• Using 10 of the most popular critiques of Marxism—that it breeds political authoritarianism, that it reduces everything to the economy, that it is a type of historical determinism, etc.—he shows how absurdly false each of these assumptions is in light of Karl Marx's own ideas.
• The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theories and the Critical Traditions (1953) written by M.H. Abrams is one of the most influential books in the field of western criticism.
• The book's title alludes to two diametrically opposed metaphors that are used to describe the artist: one compares the artist to a mirror that reflects nature as it is or as it has been refined, while the other compares the artist to a lamp that sheds light on the subject.
• Culture and Society(1958) is written by Raymond Williams where he looks into the heart of fluctuating ideas such as culture and society and attempts to define them as per their context. 
• From the last decades of the eighteenth century to the final words of modernism, this book tracks societal changes by exploring five keywords: industry, democracy, class, art, and culture.
• The meanings of such things, their essence, changes as per their use and the era in which their implications were considered

Therefore, the correct option is option 4.

The correct answer is B and D.

Key Points

• Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (1765) is a classic document of English literary criticism, whereJohnson sets forth his editorial principles and gives an appreciative analysis of the “excellences” and “defects” of the works of William Shakespeare.
• Johnson contends that Shakespeare's plays lack the moral objective that he could have included within them. Shakespeare "sacrifices virtue to convenience" and is "much more careful to please than to instruct" in favour of pleasing his audience.
• Shakespeare, in the opinion of Johnson, is negligent about bestowing pleasure and grief upon his good and evil characters respectively, leaving it up to chance. He guides everyone through good and wrong while giving room for accidents. Johnson is not satisfied with Shakespeare's drama because of this element.
• Shakespeare is wildly drawn to wordplay and equivocations, which Johnson identifies as another flaw in his plays. "A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was ready to lose it," Johnson writes in reference to this.

Therefore, the correct option is option 4.

The correct answer is Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

Key Points

• The Assertion is correct and so is the explanation because the given Reason states that beliefs can lead to logically appropriate actions, which can have unanticipated outcomes. Our chosen beliefs cannot have the desired outcome, which can create issues in determining causality.
• According to the theory of causal determinism, there is a connection between cause and effect, meaning that one event leads to another.
• Every person has the option to choose their beliefs, so they are a choice. Additionally, these ideas may result in serious repercussions and may spur illogical behavior.
• Society is full of instances of the same. Determining "causality" can frequently be difficult in such situations. Illusions of causality arise when people decide to think that there is a connection between two unrelated occurrences.

Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

The correct answer is "Life is just devoid of substance".

Key Points

• In Act 5, scene 5, lines 16–27 of Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth ( written in 1606), Macbeth says these words after learning of Lady Macbeth's death.
• Given the depth of their love, his response is surprisingly muted, but it swiftly transitions into one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches, one that shows the audience just how deeply Macbeth has been destroyed by the death of his wife and the loss of his position.
• Macbeth says: Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

• Macbeth is making a statement on the transient nature of existence, meaningless life without any substantial purpose when he compares life to an actor who "struts" for only an hour on stage before being "heard no more." Then, Macbeth implies that existence is no more significant than the meaningless babbling of an "idiot" by comparing it to a story told by one.

Therefore, the correct option is option 2.

The correct answer is Brutus to Cassius.

Key Points

• Brutus says the given line to Cassius in act 1 scene 2 of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1623).
• In response to Cassius's question as to whether Brutus favors Caesar as king or not, Brutus replies that  If it’s for the general good of Rome, he’d do anything, even if it meant his death. And may the gods grant him good favor only so long as he loves honor more than he fears death.
• The conflict between Brutus' public and private intellects is revealed. Even though Brutus professes his affection for Caesar, he acknowledges that his loyalty lies towards the people of Rome.
• Brutus vows that his love for Caesar will take a back seat to his love for the public. By asserting that he fears losing his honor more than dying, Brutus supports this claim.

Therefore, the correct option is option 3.

The correct answer is Willaim Wordsworth.

Key Points

• The first edition of "My First Acquaintance with Poets" written by William Hazlitt appeared in The Liberal, a brief but pivotal Romantic Age journal, in 1823.
• The essay is based on the author's memories of his first encounter with a "poet" approximately 25 years ago. He describes this encounter as his "baptism" into the worlds of poetry and philosophy.
• This essay aims to demonstrate the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth. Coleridge and Wordsworth were Hazlitt's first acquaintances when he was just 20 years old in 1798.
• Hazlitt paints Wordsworth in a visionary light as 'Don Quixote' like with a fire in his eye.
• Hazlitt compares Wordsworth and Coleridge, where Coleridge’s manner is more full, animated, and varied; Wordsworth’s more equable, sustained, and internal, the one might be termed more dramatic, the other more lyrical.

Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

The correct answer is "Distraught by the fact that his beauty will fade while the portrait stays beautiful".

Key Points

• In Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (1890), Gray breaks down when he sees his finished portrait because he was distraught by the fact that his beauty will fade while the portrait stays beautiful.
• The passing of time and the certainty of his own aging terrify him and he wishes that he could trade places with the portrait, maintaining his youth while the paint alters with time.
• Anglo-Irish poet, dramatist, and short story writer Oscar Wilde was a well-known writer of the late Victorian era.
• He produced several epigrams and novels. Some of his most well-known works include "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "Lady Windermere's Fan," "The Importance of Being Earnest," and "An Ideal Husband."

​Therefore, the correct option is option 3.

The correct answer is A - 4, B - 1, C - 2, and D - 3.

Key Points

• Edward Said's seminal book of criticism - Culture, and Imperialism was published in 1993. It is an anthology of essays that examines how imperialism affected the cultural heritage of the colonized people. One of the most well-known literary critics of the 20^th century was Edward Said.
• The most prominent Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton, is well known for his key essay The Illusions of Postmodernism. Eagleton has made an effort to identify the start and development of postmodernism.
• Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, a collection of critical essays on Marxism authored by eminent literary and cultural critics from around the world, was first published in 1996. The book was edited and introduced by Francis Mulhern, and was published in 1992.
• Theory into Practice: A Reader in Modern Literary Criticism brings together critical essays written by major literary and cultural critics. The book was edited and introduced by K. M. Newton and was first published in 1992.

Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

The correct answer is One stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.

Key Points 

• A dactyl is a three-syllable metrical pattern in poetry.
• In this we have a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.
• The word “poetry” itself is a great example of a dactyl, with the stressed syllable falling on the “Po,” followed by the unstressed syllables “e” and “try”: Po-e-try.

Additional Information

• Metrical patterns in poetry are called feet. A dactyl, then, is a type of foot. The other feet are iambs, trochees, anapests, and spondees.
• Dactyls were used to compose Greek epic poetry such as the Iliad or Odyssey.
• The Latin word for dactyl is dactylus, which itself has the stress pattern of a dactyl: dac-tyl-us.
• The opposite of a dactyl is an anapest, a metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (such as in the word "un-der-stand").

The correct answer is "Umberto Eco".

Key Points

• Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, literary critic, semiotician, political and social observer, and expert on the Middle Ages.
• He is most known in English for The Name of the Rose(1980), a historical mystery that blends literary theory, biblical interpretation, and semiotics, as well as his Foucault's Pendulum(1988), which also touches on related subjects.
• The book "How to Write a Thesis" offers more than simply how to write a thesis, from picking the best topic (monograph or survey; ancient or modern) to taking notes and perfecting the final draft, but also valuable ones that prepare writers for a future outside of the classroom.​

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

Additional Information

• French author and director Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in France. Together with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and Claude Simon, he was one of the individuals most closely linked with the Nouveau Roman style of the 1960s.
• Italian novelist, poet, short story author, translator, literary critic, and essayist Cesare Pavese also wrote essays. He is frequently considered one of the most important Italian authors of his generation.
• Leo Spitzer was a renowned and active literary critic who was also an Austrian philologist, Romanist, and Hispanist. He was renowned for emphasizing style. Spitzer is regarded as one of the founding figures of comparative literature, along with Erich Auerbach.

The correct answer is "An organized system of differences".

Key Points

• In his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished a theoretical linguistic duality called langue and parole.
• The systematic norms and conventions of a signaling system are encompassed by the French term langue; it is independent of, and pre-exists, the particular user.
• In contrast, parole ('speech') refers to specific instances of the usage of language, such as writings that serve as standard research material in linguistics.
• Saussure proposed structural linguistics takes a non-biological viewpoint of culture inside the nature-nurture divide.
• Langue and parole comprise two-thirds of Saussure's speech circuit; the third component is the brain, which houses the individual's knowledge of language.

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

Important Points

• Ferdinand de Saussure proposed and popularized the concept of langue and parole in his Course in General Linguistics, a collection of Saussure's university lectures gathered by his pupils and published posthumously in 1916.
• Saussure proposed a synchronic investigation of language, rejecting the mindset, ideals, and ambitions of historical linguistics.
• Rather than focusing on a specific language or the linguistic habits of a single member of a given speech community, Saussure aimed to investigate language in general and find the systems, norms, and conventions that govern how language functions.
• Throughout the twentieth century, Saussure's views on language influenced linguistics, and his imprint can be found in theoretical works on phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, and, most notably, semantics.

The correct answer is ‘(a) - (iv); (b) - (i); (c) - (ii); (d) - (iii)’.

Key Points 

• The Madwoman in the Attic is a book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, originally published in 1979.
• The book draws its title from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, where Rochester’s wife is deemed mad and imprisoned in the attic of the house by her husband.
• The book examines Victorian literature from a feminist lens.
• Its entire title is The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
• The Wretched of the Earth is a book by Frantz Fanon, originally published in 1961.
• The subject of the book is colonisation and its dehumanising effect upon the individual.
• The title of the book comes from The Internationale’s opening lyrics—‘‘les damnés de la terre’’.
• The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface to the book.
• Shakespearean Negotiations is a book by literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, published in 1989.
• Its entire title is Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England.
• Is There a Text in This Class? is a book by the literary theorist Stanley Fish, published in 1980.
• The full title of the book is Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

The correct answer is "Ideal copy".

Key Points

• A book that is complete in all of its leaves is considered to be an ideal copy. It is a book in the condition that the publisher intended for it to be sold.
• For practical purposes, the latest edition of a modern work produced during the author's lifetime is frequently believed to be the original. This is an exaggeration.
• The initial author's work could have been a manuscript, a typescript, or a recording. During the publication process, it went through multiple phases of transmission.

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

The correct option is "(a) - (iii); (b) - (iv); (c) - (ii); (d) - (i)"

Key Points

• The Frontier Thesis or Turner's Thesis is the argument advanced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893.
• The Lost Generation was the social generational cohort in the Western world that was in early adulthood during World War I. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term.
• The Third Space is a postcolonial sociolinguistic theory of identity and community realized through language. It is attributed to Homi K. Bhabha.
• Raymond Williams coined the notion of "structure of feeling" in the 1970s to facilitate a historical understanding of "affective elements of consciousness and relationships."

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 3.

The correct answer is "Cordelia to Lear".

Key Points

• The exchange takes place between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Act 4 Scene 7 of  King Lear.
• William Shakespeare wrote the tragedy, King Lear. It is based on Britain's mythical Leir.
• In order to prepare for his impending old age, King Lear shares his authority and land with his daughters. He degenerates into an impoverished, mad target of political intrigue.
• Cordelia is King Lear's favourite and the youngest of his three daughters.
• She is banished for the majority of the play when her elderly father offers her the chance to confess her love to him in exchange for one-third of the land in his kingdom.

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

The correct option is "Iambic is to Trochaic as Anapestic is to Dactylic"

Key Points

• The meters with two-syllable feet are:

1. IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me behold.
2. TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers
3. SPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

• The meters with three-syllable feet are:

1. ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still.
2. DACTYLIC (/ x x): This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 3.

The correct answer is "The Sea, The Sea".

Key Points

• The Sea, The Sea (1978) is a novel by Iris Murdoch.
• The novel centers around the character named Charles Arrowby who was a playwright and a director.
• The plot deals with how he decides one day to withdraw from his career and live in seclusion in a house by house.
• During his seclusion he decides to write a memoir.
• His obsession with his former lover Mary Hartley Fitch is the main highlight of this work.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 3".

Important Points 

• Iris Murdoch is an Irish and British novelist.
• Her work is known for themes like good and evil, morality, relationships, and the power of unconsciousness.
• This work is her nineteenth novel and she received Booker Prize for this work in 1978.

Additional Information

• The works The Sandcastle, Under the Net, and Flight from the Enchanter are novels by Iris Murdoch.
• Under the Net  (1954) is her first work. It is a picaresque and philosophical work that centers around a young writer named Jake Donaghue.
• The Sandcastle is a story middle-aged schoolmaster who meets a young painter.
• The Flight from the Enchanter is about a group of people who are caught under a mystic spell.

The correct answer is "To rid Thebes of the plague that afflicts its people".

Key Points

• Greek playwright Sophocles' Oedipus Rex was first staged in the fifth century BC.
• At the play's beginning, a group of individuals led by a priest approach Oedipus. They request Oedipus' assistance in ridding the city of the plague.
• Although Oedipus acknowledges the severity of the problems, he searches for solutions in an ironic manner because it is his own misdeeds that are to blame for Thebes' problems.
• When Oedipus finally realizes that he is the cause of the issues in Thebes, he departs the city in accordance with his oath.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

Important Points 

• Sophocles' early plays were composed after those of Aeschylus or at the same time as them, but before those of Euripides.
• Only seven of Sophocles' roughly 120 plays —Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus—have been preserved in their entirety.
• Sophocles held the title of most renowned playwright for about fifty years during the Lenaean and Dionysian festivals; when the city-state of Athens held its dramatic contests.

The correct answer is "Coriolanus".

Key Points

• Coriolanus is a five-act play by William Shakespeare.
• It is considered an important play under the banner of Roman play by Shakespeare.
• The play is based on the life of the Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus.
• He gained that name after his military victory against the Volscians at Corioli.
• However, in the end, he makes peace between the Volscians and Romans and returns them to their capital.
• The story ends with Coriolanus being killed by Aufidius's men for betraying the Romans.

 Therefore, the correct answer is "option 2". 

Additional Information

• Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by Shakespeare. It is considered to be Shakespeare's first play.
• This is his first play where the cross-dressing of the actors was seen.
• The play Troilus and Cressida is based on the theme of the Trojan war. Both Troilus and Cressida are trojans who loved each other.
• However, when Cressida was exchanged as a war prisoner to the Greeks he decides to avenge Diomedes who courted Cressida.
• Romeo and Juliet is a romance by Shakespeare written during his early career.
• The play is about the romance of Romeo and Juliet who are from two families in a feud with each other.

The correct answer is "Hegemony".

Key Points

• Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, linguist, writer, and politician.
• His notable work Prison Notebook is considered to be important political work.
• Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony.
• It is described as a practice by the state and bourgeoisie to maintain their power in the capitalist society.
• Hegemonic culture propagates the values created by the upper class so that they become common and natural among all. This maintains the force and order of the capitalist society.
• This hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through institutions which are superstructures named by Marx.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 4".  

Additional Information

• Ideology is a concept by Louis Althusser. It talks about the impact of capitalism on the common subject.
• Ideology normalizes the reinforcement of the hegemonic culture of the dominant class.
• Discourse is a concept introduced by Michel Foucault. According to him, discourse is a history that is subjected to change as per the socio-political changes.
• It is produced and transmitted through knowledge and meaning.

The correct answer is "usually the reverse of the title page".

Key Points

• The copyright page is usually found on the reverse side of the title page.
• It is also known as the edition notice.
• The page contains important information like
• the current edition
• copyright notice
• legal notices
• publication information (the address and contact of the publishing house)
• printing history
• ISBN of the book (This is the identification mark of the book)

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 2".

The correct answer is "T.S Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture"

Key Points

• The given lines are taken from the work Notes Towards the Definition of Culture by T.S Eliot.
• It is a critical work by Eliot. It appeared as a series of articles in New England Weekly in 1943.
• It was published as a book in 1948.
• In this work, Eliot presents culture as an organic shared system of belief that cannot be artificially produced.
• According to Eliot, the chief means of transition of this culture is family.
• The book is often considered a critique of postwar Europe.
• Also it is seen as a defense of the conservatism of Christianity.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 2". 

Additional Information

• Culture and Society by Raymond Williams is a critical work published in 1958.
• It argues that culture in the present day is produced and developed in response to the Industrial Revolution.
• In Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, F.R Leavis argues that the culture belongs to the minority society and appreciation of art and literature depends on it.
• In Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Stuart Hall says that representation is the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture.
• The exchange takes place through the use of language, signs, and images which stand for or represent things.

The correct answer is "Picaro".

Key Points

• The protagonists of Cervantes' Don Quixote, Mark Twain's The adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Thomas Mann's The Confessions of Felix Krull can be considered as Picaro.
• 'Picaro' is a Spanish word that means a roguish male adventurer. It refers to the following characteristics:
• ​novels that focus on rogue characters.
• The characters are clever, mischievous, and adventurous.
• 'Don Quixote' is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes.
• The novel revolves around the adventures of an eponymous middle-aged man maned Don Quixote, and his squire Sancho Panza.
• Mark Twain's most celebrated work, The Adventure of Tom Swayer is about a young named Tom Swayer who is mischievous and has a world of adventure of his own.
• 'The Confession of Felix Krull' is an unfinished novel by Thomas Mann.
• The story is about the swindler Felix Krull and the plot revolves around his life from infancy to adulthood.
• Therefore, in all three novels, the characters befit the description of a 'picaro' character.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 2".

The correct answer is "Imagism".

Key Points

• Ezra Pound wrote the 14-line Imagist poem "In A Station of the Metro" in 1913. The piece is regarded as the pinnacle of Imagist poetry since the subject's look is handled through the poem's inherent visuality.
• Imagism is a movement from the 20^th century that focuses on using vivid, well-defined images to convey ideas and feelings rather than romanticism or symbolism in poetry, free verse, new rhythmic effects, and everyday language.
• This poem successfully conjures up both a busy subway station and flower petals on a branch. The poem urges the reader to compare urban life to the natural world and, maybe, to view both of these spheres in a new way by blurring the distinction between the speaker's reality and imagination through the juxtaposition of these two very different images.

Therefore, the correct option is option 4.

Additional Information

• J. D. Scott, the literary editor of The Spectator, invented the name "The Movement" in 1954 to refer to a group of authors that included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, and Robert Conquest.
• Naturalism is a late 19^th-century literary movement in which writers focused on exploring the fundamental causes for their characters’ actions, choices, and beliefs. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, a French art critic, first used the term naturalism to describe a style of lifelike painting that became popular in the early 1860s. Émile Zola then applied the term to literature in his seminal essay “The Experimental Novel,”(1880).
• As a reaction to naturalism and realism, the symbolism was a late 19^th-century art style with French and Belgian roots that sought to symbolically depict ultimate truths through language and metaphorical images.

The correct answer is "Deep structure - Surface structure".

Key Points

• The terms deep structure and surface structure were introduced by Noam Chomsky as a part of his work on transformational grammar.
• As per Chomsky deep structure refers to concepts, thoughts, ideas & feelings whereas surface structure refers to the words / language we use to represent the deep structure.
• A theoretical concept called the deep structure of a linguistic expression aims to bring together various connected components. For instance, the meaning and wording of the lines "John drives bike" and "Bike is driven by John" are essentially the same.
• The two phrases are different surface forms that result from a shared (or very similar) deep structure, according to some linguists, including Chomsky.

Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

The correct answer is "Bech: A Book and Bech is Back".

Key Points

• The works "Bech: A Book" and "Bech is Back" are written by John Updike.
• The stories were published earlier as a series of assorted stories and were later compiled into a book.
• Henry Bech is the fictional character in both of these works created by the author.
• The character is considered to be an alternate self of Updike.
• This character was his mouthpiece which he used to relent sarcasm and caustic insights into writers and writing life.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 4". 

Additional Information

• 'Rabbit Redux' and 'Rabbit, Run' are novels from the Rabbit series by John Updike. The central character in the Rabbit series is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom.
• Rabit, Run is the first novel in the series and Rabbit Redux is the second novel.
• Rabbit is Rich is the third novel in this tetralogy of rabbit series.
• The Coup is a black comedy by John Updike that hatefully reflects on American things. The story takes place in a fictional town in suburban Africa.
• Of the Farm is Updike's fourth novel that revolves around the character Joey Robinson.
• The Centaur is a novel by Updike that reflects on the relationship between a depressed father and an anxious son, similar to the author's relationship with his father.

The correct answer is "Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A)".

Key Points

• Language is used by humans as an essential tool for communication.
• It is used to convey emotions and important messages between a sender and a receiver.
• Meaning is essential in communication and language helps in constructing meaning in communication.
• Therefore, the given assertion is true.
• Language is however a collection of abstract symbols and signs.
• To turn these abstract symbols into a concrete meaning, language takes into consideration of different aspects like context, perception, and shared understanding.
• Hence, the speaker's and receiver's context and perception are crucial to the meaning of a language.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 1".

The correct answer is "(a) - (iv); (b) - (iii); (c) - (i); (d) - (ii)".

Key Points

• The Doctor’s Dilemma is a problem play by G.B. Shaw. It deals with ethical deliberations and problems in the medical field. 
• The central character is a doctor named Sir Colenso Ridgeon. The play mocks the physician's ignorance.
• You Never Can Tell is a famous comedy by G.B. Shaw. This belongs to his 'Pleasant Play' set.
• The play is social criticism and its central theme is the devaluation of social traditions
• Candida is another famous comedy by G.B. Shaw.
• It explores different aspects of a conjugal relationship and comments on love and marriage in Victorian society.
• Arms and the Man is a famous play by G.B. Shaw that talks about the futility of war. 
• The play satirizes the military heroes and presents the anti-hero qualities of brave soldiers.

​Therefore, the correct answer is "option 4".

The correct answer is "A and C".

Key Points

• Hermeneutics, in its broadest sense, describes the interpretation of meanings – explication, analysis, commentary. Originally applied to the interpretation of the Bible, Hermeneutics comprised valid readings plus exegesis (commentary on how the meanings were to be applied).
• Edmund Husserl occupies a special place in the development of hermeneutics, as he provided many of the concepts hermeneutics later used. Husserl took the discovery of the correlation between consciousness and object to be the breakthrough performed by his phenomenology.
• Martin Heidegger generalizes hermeneutics from a traditional method for interpreting authoritative texts (mainly sacred or legal texts) to a way of understanding human beings themselves.  He is known for his work Being and Time (1927), where he introduced   "Dasein"  a term for the type of being that humans possess.

Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

Additional Information

• E. D. Hirsch is an American educator, literary critic, and theorist of education who is known for his work Cultural Literacy (1987).
• Stephen Greenblatt is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. Greenblatt is one of the founders of new historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term.

The correct answer is "A - 4, B - 2, C - 1, D - 3".

Key Points

• **Laurence Sterne'**s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) was published by Robert Dodsley. Dossley also published works by Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, and Boswell.
• Andrew Millar published two works by Henry Fielding's Tom Jones in 1749 and Amelia in 1751. Tom Jones is among the earliest English works classified as a novel. He paid Fielding a total sum of £700 for Tom Jones and £1000 for Amelia.
• Thomas Lowndes, who expressed interest in Francesd Burney's Evelina or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World after reading its first volume, consented to publish it after receiving the completed work but did so anonymously and without her father's knowledge or consent in 1778.
• William Taylor published Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe for the first time in 1719. It was one of the first English novels and one of the most well-known adventure tales ever written.

Therefore, the correct option is option 3.

The correct answer is "Ironic".

Key Points

• The poem is a sad portrayal of the wretched condition of a grocer's family.
• The children only get stale food, moldy cakes, and tainted meat to eat.
• The family is extremely poor to provide them with fresh food and they keep surviving on that expired food.
• The poem presents a realistic picture of the poverty-stricken life of the grocer's family.
• However, in the end, it ends on a positive note that they are never kept hungry.
• This is irony in the poem, where the poet says points out that they are surviving with rotten foods.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 1".

The correct answer is "Spoiled".

 Key Points

• The poem 'The Grocer's Children' depicts the real picture of the poverty-stricken life of a grocer's family.
• The family is poor and is unable to provide fresh supplements to their children.
• The wretched condition of the family is expressed by the kind of rotten food the children are eating in the house.
• Here, the poet mentions that the children could only eat 'tainted meat'.
• The word 'tainted' means something that is not fresh or spoiled food. The meat they were having was stale.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 3".

The correct answer is "It presents a series of inedible fare in the face of the basic need to eat".

Key Points

• The poem 'The Grocer's Children' presents a sad reality of the poverty-stricken life of a grocer's family.
• The family sells staple foodstuffs and household goods which does not get them proper earnings.
• The family is in extreme poverty and is unable to provide basic necessities like fresh food to their children.
• The wretched condition of the family is expressed by the poet through the kind of stale food the children eat to survive.
• These kinds of food keep them away from hunger but they provide no nutritional value to them.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 2".

The correct answer is "The narrator's".

Key Points

• The poem expresses the point of view of the narrator.
• It begins by mentioning 'The Grocer's Children'. The poem is written in the third-person perspective.
• The hapless condition of the grocer's family is narrated by the narrator of the poem.
• The narrator comments throughout the poem on how the grocer's family is fighting their poverty.
• Most importantly the narrator mentions the quality of food the children are having to just survive.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 3".

The correct answer is 'The Darkling Thrush'.

Key Points 

• "The Darkling Thrush" is a poem by Thomas Hardy.
• Originally titled "By the Century's Deathbed", it was first published on 29 December 1900 in The Graphic.
• The poem was later published in London Times on 1 January 1901.
• A deleted '1899' on the poem's manuscript suggests that it may have been written in that year.
• It was later included in a collection entitled Poems of the Past and the Present (1901).

Additional Information

• The first two stanzas describe a bleak winter landscape at dusk and the feeling of lifelessness that it produces.
• In stanza three, the melancholy atmosphere is transformed when "an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small" suddenly launches into "a full-hearted evensong of joy illimited."
• The final stanza muses that since there was no apparent cause for such an ecstatic outburst, the bird's singing must have been inspired by "some blessed Hope, whereof he knew and I was unaware."
• The use of the word "darkling" recalls the same word in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach (1867), a poem about the loss of faith.

The correct answer is ‘To study the problems of Calcutta University’.

Key Points 

• The Government of India set up the Sadler Commission in 1917 to look into the problems faced by Calcutta University.
• M.E. Saddler, the then vice-chancellor of Leeds University, was appointed as the Chairman of the Commission.
• The Commission submitted its report and recommendations after seventeen months.
• The Commission recognized the significance of mother-tongue, arguing that mother-tongue may be used in high schools while English must be retained in the higher classes.
• The Commission’s recommendations were widely accepted.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 2.

The correct answer is "Michelangelo".

Key Points

• T. S. Eliot, a British poet of American descent, published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock as the first professionally published poem in the June 1915 edition of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at Ezra Pound's request.
• Prufrock's complaints about his mental and physical stagnation, the missed possibilities in his life, and his lack of spiritual development form the poem's core themes.
• Eliot presented one of the most recognizable voices in contemporary literature by demonstrating Prufrock's unrequited love, feelings of fatigue, regret, sexual frustration, and a consciousness of morality.
• In addition, Eliot drew influence from French poet Jules LaForgue for his recurrent women who appear and disappear throughout the poem and discuss Michelangelo.​

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

Additional Information

• ​​​Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was a High Renaissance Italian polymath who worked as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect.
• Raphael was one of the three High Renaissance masters, along with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. He was also the youngest, and he died too soon after a life of extraordinary creativity and achievement.
• Donato di Niccol di Betto Bardi, also known as Donatello, was a Florentine Renaissance sculptor. He was born in Florence and learned classical sculpture, which he used to build a comprehensive Renaissance sculpting style.

The correct answer is Francis Bacon.

Key Points

• Francis Bacon was a philosopher and Lord chancellor under Jacob I.
• He is also popular as the proponent of inductive reasoning.
• He believed that religious beliefs should be replaced by scientific facts.
• The statement given in the question is from his essay 'of Unity in Religion'.
• Bacon in his essay propounds that religion should maintain its unity.
• In England at Bacon's time, the church had multiple divisions which led to conflict and even bloodshed.
• He proposed that religion is a binding force in a society and hence, Church should not let divisions and quarrels happen by maintaining its unity.
• Therefore, from all the points discussed above, we can conclude that "He that is not with us is against us. He that is not against us is with us." was said by Francis Bacon.

Additional Information Let's look at other options:

The correct option is "Parole"

Key Points

• The term linguistic performance was used by Noam Chomsky in 1960 to describe "the actual use of language in concrete situations".
• It is used to describe both the production, sometimes called parole, as well as the comprehension of language.
• Performance is defined in opposition to "competence"; the latter describes the mental knowledge that a speaker or listener has of language.
• Performance describes the observable use of language while competence describes the unconscious and innate knowledge of linguistic rules.
• Parole is the physical manifestation of signs; in particular the concrete manifestation of langue as speech or writing.

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 2.

The correct answer is "A and D".

Key Points

• The introduction of Wood's Dispatch, known as the "Magna Carta" of Indian education, in 1854 marked the beginning of the systematic teaching of English in that country.
• The Board of Control's President, Sir Charles Wood, was instrumental in spreading English education and female education in India.
• In an 1854 letter to Lord Dalhousie, the Governor General of India, he advocated for the use of vernacular languages in primary schools, Anglo-vernacular languages in high schools, and English as the principal language of instruction at the college level. This letter is referred to as Wood's dispatch.
• Additionally there was also an emphasis on women's education and vocational training.
• As a result, English education began to advance day by day, and in 1857, three universities were founded in what was then Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras to provide Indian locals with higher education.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 1.

The correct answer is "It suggests the choice between a son and a daughter".

Key Points

• Dombey and Son is a novel by Charles Dickens.
• The story centers on Paul Dombey, a wealthy and proud shipping merchant, who puts his faith in his son, also named Paul, to continue his business and uphold the family name.
• Meanwhile, he neglects his kind-hearted daughter Florence.
• The young Paul is frail and sickly, and he dies in childhood, leaving Dombey devastated.
• The story ends with Paul finally accepting his daughter.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 1".

Additional Information

• Charles Dicken was an important writer and social critic of the Victorian Age.
• His works particularly commented on social reforms, child rights, human rights, and the condition of human lives during his time.
• His notable works are Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Tale of Two Cities.

The correct answer is "It is only self-serving".

Key Points

• Thomas Becket in part 1 section 5 of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral says "The last temptation is the greatest treason\To do the right deed for the  wrong reason."
• Thomas, the archbishop of canterbury retreats into himself to consider the Fourth Tempter's promise that he could find glory if he wills martyrdom for himself.
• Becket has come to Canterbury with the desire to be a martyr and a saint and with the fear that even this holy station and power will be temporary.
• Though he is acting according to God's plan, he is acting based on his desires and attempting to manipulate the wheel of fate to the end he has chosen.

Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

The correct answer is "Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar A. Poe, Henry James".

Key Points

• Captain Ahab, is the protagonist in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). He is the captain of the whaling ship Pequod. Captain Ahab lost his one leg as Moby Dick, the whale bit off which made him wear a prosthetic leg.
• Hester Prynne, the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterwork The Scarlet Letter (1850), is among the first and most important female protagonists in American literature. She's the embodiment of deep contradictions: bad and beautiful, holy and sinful, conventional and radical.
• Rodrick Usher is the central character of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) a cultured, sensitive man skilled in music and educated in strange and occult topics. Roderick suffers from a nervous condition and shows a strong, almost supernatural connection with his twin, Madeline, and the physical House itself.
• Daisy Miller is the titular character in Henry James' novella Daisy Miller (1878), she is a young, pretty, independent-minded American from Schenectady, New York, who has come to Europe with her mother and brother Randolph. Daisy is enchanted by the European sights, and is eager to see and experience whatever she can. She is cheerful and talkative, and isn’t afraid to speak her mind—even with people she doesn’t know very well.

Therefore, the correct option is option 2.

The correct answer is "B and C".

Key Points

• Michel Foucault's understanding of power changes between his early work on institutions (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish) and his later work on sexuality and governmentality.
• Foucault explores in his work  Discipline and Punish how the creation of modern disciplines, with their principles of order and control, tends to "disindividualize" power, making it seem as if power resides in the prison, the school, the factory, and so on. One is left  with the paranoid feeling that we are powerless before such an effective and diffuse form of social control.
• Physical bodies are subjugated and made to behave in certain ways, as a microcosm of social control of the wider population, through what he called ‘bio-power’.
• Disciplinary and bio-power create a ‘discursive practice’ or a body of knowledge and behaviour that defines what is normal, acceptable, deviant, etc.
• Foucault includes a new element to his understanding of power: freedom. "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free". Conversely, "slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains.

Therefore, the correct option is option 2.

The correct answer is "F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition".

Key Points

• The Great Tradition by FR Leavis, published in 1948, is an unflinching examination of English literature that begins controversially with the statement: "The great English writers are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad".
• He believes that these authors are the best because they not only "transform the possibilities of art for practitioners and readers," but also foster "knowledge of the possibilities of life,"
• Jane Austen is “one of the truly great writers, and herself a major fact in the background of other great writers”. She provides a faithful, and enlightening portrayal of ingenuity and artistically portrays the connection between individual talent and tradition.
• Leavis quotes Cecil Day Lewis, who observes that George Eliot is “the first modern novelist who not only excels entertainment but also explores “serious problems and preoccupations of mature life”. She breaks with the primary tradition of form and matter characteristic of the novel of her times.
• Henry James is a genius who creates an ideal civilised sensibility and possesses the capacity to communicate by the finest means of implication.
• Joseph Conrad is also an innovator in form and method who takes serious interest in life. Like James, Conrad views fiction as a serious art where the peculiar way of the ingenuity and uniqueness of the artist could be explicitly drawn.

​Therefore, the correct option is option 3.

Additional Information

• Walter Allen's The English Novel (1955) is a panorama of English fiction, the development of the novel is followed from Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" to James Joyce and D.H.Lawrence. The evolution of the novel over a period of 250 years is revealed by an appraisal of the work of the most significant novelists in English.
• Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (2004) covers the works of major authors, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. Follows the model of Eagleton’s hugely popular Literary Theory: An Introduction (1996).
• Ian Watt in  Rise of the Novel (1957)  traces the genesis and development of the most popular of all literary forms, the novel. In his penetrating and original readings of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, he investigates the reasons why the three main eighteenth-century novelist wrote in the way they did - a way resulting ultimately in the modern novel of the present day.

The correct answer is "A character's knowledge or expectation is contradicted by what the audience knows, or by the outcome of events".

Key Points

• ‘Dramatic irony’ is a literary device in which a character’s knowledge or expectation is contradicted by what the audience knows, or by the outcome of events.
• Dramatic irony, also known as tragic irony is a literary and theatrical device, used in drama to indicate the incongruity between the audience’s and the character’s understanding of the dramatic events.
• Dramatic irony occurs when the audience or readers’ knowledge or understanding of events surpasses the knowledge or expectations of the characters in a play.
• To put it this way, when the audience knows more about a situation and its outcomes than the characters do, it’s called dramatic irony.

​Therefore, the correct option is option 1.

The correct answer is Marcel Mauss.

Key Points

• J. Hillis Miller uses Marcel Mauss's theories on the custom of giving and receiving presents to support her claims in the essay "Critic as Host."
• The 1977 publication of "Critic as Host," a critical essay by renowned American literary critic J. Hills Miller, is a significant work.
• "The Deconstructive Angel," by M. H. Abrams served as inspiration for the essay. In order to analyze a literary work's meaning, the essay discusses the deconstructive reading of texts and the roles of hosts and parasites.
• In this essay, Miller supports her points with Marcel Mauss' theories on the custom of giving and receiving gifts.

Therefore, the correct option is option 3.

Additional Information

• French sociologist Émile Durkheim was well-known in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. He is recognized as one of the key pioneers of contemporary sociology, alongside Karl Marx and Max Weber. On the Division of Social Labor, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life are among his best-known works.
• Max Weber is considered one of the three founding fathers of sociology, alongside Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim. His text "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" was considered a founding text in sociology.
• Daniel Bell was an American sociologist and journalist who used sociological theory to reconcile what he believed were the inherent contradictions of capitalist societies. He is best remembered as the author of The End of Ideology (1960).

The correct answer is ‘Utopia’.

Key Points 

• Thomas More (1478-1535) was an English lawyer, statesman and philosopher.
• He is best remembered as the author of Utopia, originally published at Louvain, Belgium, in 1516.
• Utopia was a socio-political satire which was written in universal Latin.
• The book describes a fictional island, its people and society, who live in a nearly perfect state.
• The English word ‘utopia’ which means ‘good place’ is derived from the title of the book.
• The first edition of the book also carried verses by the Flemish Peter Giles, to whom More dedicated the work.
• It was revised by Erasmus.
• The 1518 edition of the book printed at Basel also carried two woodcuts from the hand of the German Holbein.

Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

Additional Information 

• Confessio Amantis is a poem by John Gower, composed sometime around 1390 in Middle English with 33,000 lines.
• The Golden Legend is a book which depicts the lives of the saints by Jacobus de Voragine, compiled around 1259-1266 and read widely in medieval Europe.
• Erewhon is a satirical novel by Samuel Butler set in a fictional country named Erewhon, first published anonymously in 1872.

The correct option is "Layamon, William Langland, William Dunbar"

Key Points

• Layamon was an English poet and priest and a **12^th/13^th-**century poet. The author of the Brut, a notable work that was the first to present the legends of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in English poetry. It is the first historiography 16,096 lines long and is also known as Layamon's Brut or The chronicle of Britain.
• William Langland was born in 1332  and is the presumed author of a work of Middle English alliterative verse generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes.
• Piers Plowman is a mix of theological allegory and social satire that concerns the narrator/dreamer's quest for the true Christian life in the context of medieval Catholicism.
• William Dunbar born between 1459-1460 was a Scottish court poet, active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 3.

The correct answer is "The Watsons".

Key Points

• The Watsons is an unfinished work by Jane Austen that was presumably started about 1803.
• A variety of explanations have been presented as to why she did not complete it, and other authors have since undertaken the feat.
• Austen's niece released a continuation in 1850. In 1871, a manuscript fragment was published.​

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

Additional Information

• Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen's coming-of-age story and satire of Gothic fiction. Northanger Abbey was finished in 1803, the earliest of Austen's works to be finished completely, but it was published posthumously in 1817 alongside Persuasion.
• Jane Austen's final novel, Persuasion; was published on December 20, 1817, along with Northanger Abbey, six months after her death.
• Jane Austen's novel Emma is about adolescent arrogance and romantic misunderstandings. It takes place in the fictional country village of Highbury and the nearby estates of Hartfield, Randalls, and Donwell Abbey, and focuses on the interactions of a small group of people.

The correct answer is "The Lung".

Key Points

• J. G. Farrell is an Irish-born English author.
• He drew on his own polio infection, which he contracted at Oxford, for the 1965 book The Lung, which is about polio agony and paints a depressing picture of an agitated man chained to an iron lung.

​Therefore, the correct answer is option 3.

Important Points 

• He is best known for his "Empire Trilogy" of books, which included the novels "Troubles," "The Siege of Krishnapur," and "The Singapore Grip."
• His first book, A Man from Elsewhere (1963), is a philosophical account of a communist journalist trying to uncover a famous author's past and is based on French existentialism.

Additional Information

• Troubles (1970) is a book by J. G. Farrell. In the middle of the political unrest of the Irish War of Independence, the plot centers on the decay of a once-grand Irish hotel. It is the first book of Farrell's critically praised "Empire Trilogy," which also includes The Singapore Grip and The Siege of Krishnapur.
• The Singapore Grip is a novel by J. G. Farrell. The book was released in 1978, the year before he passed away. The Singapore Grip was chosen as one of the top ten Singaporean classic novels in 2015 by Akshita Nanda of The Straits Times.
• J.G. Farrell was working on The Hill Station when he, unfortunately, passed away unexpectedly at a young age. Dr. McNab, his wife, and their young niece reluctantly make their way to the cool Shimla highlands. Romance is in the air for Emily. There is a scandal developing for the enigmatic Mrs. Forester.

The correct option is "Skeltonic"

Key Points

• The Tudor poet and satirist, John Skelton (1460-1529) was an English poet who wrote extensively on religious and political themes.
• He had an individual poetic style of an irregular meter, sometimes in falling and sometimes in rising rhythm and with short rhyming lines, based on natural speech rhythms.
• This short staccato rhymed line poetry (called doggerel) became a specific quality of John Skelton under the epithet, Skeltonic.
• Skelton wrote his verses as works of satire and protest, and thus the form was considered deliberately unconventional and provocative.
• The meter is deliberately employed by the poet for satiric, comic or rollicking effect. The poet moves with easy, and some time with mastery.

Therefore, the correct answer is Option 4.

The correct answer is "(a) - 2, (b) - 4, (c) - 1, (d) - 3".

Key Points

• Kate Nickleby  is Nicholas Nickleby's younger sister in Charles Dickens' novel Nicholas Nickleby. She is a somewhat docile character, as Dickensian women seem to be, but she also exhibits some of her brother's tenacity and willpower. She defends herself against the lecherous Sir Mulberry Hawk and doesn't flinch from hard labor to make ends meet. With Frank Cheeryble, she finally gets the happiness she deserves.
• Florence Dombey is the daughter of Paul Dombey in the novel Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. She yearns for the love of her father. Eventually, she marries Walter Gay and reconciles with her father.
• Miss Havisham is a wealthy, eccentric elderly woman in Charles Dickens' classic Great Expectations. She resides in Kent, southeast England's Satis House, a sizable but dilapidated estate close to Pip's village. On the day of her wedding, when her intended spouse deserts her, she destroys the structures and the surrounding area, even stopping the clocks at the precise time she discovered her lover's betrayal.
• Agnes Wickfield is the daughter of Mr. Wickfield and also David's second wife in Charles Dickens' classic work David Copperfield. She is a dutiful companion and housekeeper to her father and a sisterly friend to David while he stays at the Wickfield house. She proves to be a perfect wife and an inspiration to David in his writing.

​Therefore, the correct option is option 2.

Additional Information

• English writer and critic Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) was born in England.
• He is widely recognized as the preeminent novelist of the Victorian era and is credited with creating some of the most well-known fictional characters in history.
• His writings experienced remarkable success during his lifetime, and by the 20^th century, critics and academics regarded him as a literary master. His novels are a must read till date, especially his short stories.

The correct answer is "Cry, The Peacock".

Key Points

• Cry, The Peacock is a novel by the Indian author Anita Desai.
• The story reflects on the unhappy marriage and its tragic consequences.
• The plot revolves around a strained relationship between Maya and Gautam.
• Maya is the narrator of the story. She is a sensitive character who is stuck in an incompatible marital relationship with Gautam.
• She is unappreciated by her husband throughout her married life.
• Under such a situation she loses her sanity and kills her husband. Later she commits suicide.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 3".

Additional Information 

• Anita Desai is an Indian-American novelist who also received Sahitya Academy Award for her work 'Fire on the Mountain'.
• 'Cry, The Peacock' is the first novel by Anita Desai, published in the year 1963.
• The works Voices in the City, In Custody, and Baumgartner's Bombay are novels written by her.
• Her work portrays the inner psyche of her characters especially the agony of female protagonists under the customs of society.
• Voices in the City talks about Monisha and her issues in marital life.
• However, her work In Custody and Baumgartner's Bombay reflect on the socio-political situation of the period as well.

The correct answer is "death and disease".

Key Points

• Dark Comedy is also known as dark humor or gallows humor.
• It is a literary device that is used for representing a serious subject matter in a light manner.
• The serious subject matter generally includes taboo subjects like death, crime, poverty, suicide, war, violence, terrorism, discrimination, disease, racism, sexism, and human sexuality.
• The term was coined by surrealist theorist Andre Breton in 1953.
• He used the term to describe the works of Jonathan Swift.
• he credits him to be the originator of this genre, especially found in his works A Modest Proposal and Directions to Servant.
• Black humor does not deal with old age.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 3".

The correct answer is "The flourishing of African American literature in the 1920s and 1930s".

Key Points

• Harlem Renaissance was an Afro-American movement that bloomed around the 1920s and 1930s in New York City.
• The movement highlighted the African-American culture in creative art like theatre, visual arts, and music.
• The movement was against the white stereotype and reconceptualize "The Negro" history and heritage.
• The movement was also an attempt to break free from Victorian morals and bourgeoisie thoughts that reinforced racist thoughts.
• The movement led to the groundwork of the birth of American literature, Black literature, and Black cultural consciousness throughout the world.

Therefore, the correct answer is "option 2".

Additional Information

• W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes are important figures in this movement.
• The Crisis was an important journal related to this movement. It was published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
• Black music like Jazz and Blues became crucial to the spread of the movement worldwide.

The correct answer is "Robin Hood".

Key Points

• Early in February 1818, "Lines about the Mermaid Tavern" was composed, and it was published in 1820. In this poem, Keats makes a comparison between the world and Elysium, the afterlife home of the blessed in classical mythology.
• Keats was a great admirer of Elizabethan poets and dramatists. On The Mermaid Tavern, he pays a tribute to their memory and their happy life.
• He is pondering the whereabouts of the poets' souls. A "happy field" or a "mossy cavern," possibly? Did it surpass the Mermaid Tavern in quality? There must have been a bar at Mermaid Tavern in the real world.
• So the next question is about the drinks and fruits served in Elysium. He is curious as to whether the beverages were superior than the canary wine served here. And was there enough food for everyone, as there was at the feasts that Robin Hood and Marian, his beloved, hosted?

Therefore, the correct option is option 4.