English Literature MCQs Set 8

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Author: Nasir Iqbal | Assistant Professor of English Literature

English Literature MCQs Set 8
Updated on: November 4, 2025
Estimated Reading Time: 16 min

English Literature MCQs

Set-8

1. In which of the Shakespearean comedies does the song “Sigh no more, ladies” occur?

A. As You Like It
B. Much Ado About Nothing
C. The Twelfth Night
D. A Midsummer Night’s Dream

B. Much Ado About Nothing
The song is sung by Balthasar in Act II, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s comedy.

2. The Pilgrims in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales go to the pilgrimage to the tomb of:

A. St. Thomas A. Beckett
B. St. Paul
C. St. John
D. St. Peter

A. St. Thomas A. Beckett
The pilgrims travel to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, the murdered Archbishop.

3. Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar is called a calendar because:

A. It is a historical document
B. It predicts the seasons
C. It is a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year
D. It is written in a chronological style

C. It is a series of pastoral eclogues for every month of the year
The work is composed of twelve separate eclogues (pastoral poems), each corresponding to a month.

4. The good Angel and evil Angel appear in :

A. Macbeth
B. Dr. Faustus
C. Hamlet
D. King Lear

B. Dr. Faustus
The Good Angel and Evil Angel are allegorical figures representing Faustus’s internal struggle in Marlowe’s tragedy.
5. In England, the theatres were closed in :

A. 1650
B. 1642
C. 1660
D. 1645

B. 1642
Theatres were closed by the Puritan government at the outbreak of the English Civil War.

6. “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” is written by :

A. John Milton
B. John Donne
C. Richard Lovelace
D. Andrew Marvell

D. Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell’s ode is a complex and subtle political poem addressing Oliver Cromwell.

7. Which of the following works of Dryden is a political satire?

A. Absalom and Achitophel
B. All for Love
C. Essay of Dramatic Poesy
D. Mac Flecknoe

A. Absalom and Achitophel
Dryden’s satirical poem employs a biblical allegory to satirize the Exclusion Crisis and its opponents.

8. Moliere’s Le Misanthrope has been adapted partly in …………………

A. The Man of Mode
B. The Plain Dealer
C. The Way of the World
D. The Country Wife

B. The Plain Dealer
William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676) is a biting satire influenced by Molière’s Le Misanthrope.

9. The Restoration comedy is known as ……………………

A. the comedy of humours
B. the comedy of manners
C. the sentimental comedy
D. the domestic comedy

B. the comedy of manners
Restoration Comedy satirized the social codes and manners of the aristocratic court.
10. ‘Pandemonium’ as described in The Paradise Lost is in ……………………

A. the heaven
B. the hell
C. the earth
D. the cosmos

B. the hell
Pandemonium (meaning “all demons”) is the capital city and parliament built by the fallen angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost, located in Hell.

11. In which famous poem do we find the lines: “Full many a gem of purest ray serene ……… / Full many a flower is born to blush unseen ………”?

A. ‘Ode to Evening’
B. “Elegy Written in Country Churchyard”
C. ‘The Deserted Village’
D. ‘The Task’

B. “Elegy Written in Country Churchyard”
These lines are from Thomas Gray’s Elegy, lamenting the potential, undiscovered greatness of the village poor.

12. Who is the author of Moll Flanders ?

A. Jonathan Swift
B. Defoe
C. Richardson
D. Fielding

B. Defoe
Moll Flanders (1722) is one of the early novels written by Daniel Defoe.

13. Who among the following popularised the heroic couplet?

A. John Milton
B. John Donne
C. Samuel Johnson
D. Pope

D. Pope
Alexander Pope brought the heroic couplet (rhymed iambic pentameter) to its highest peak of perfection in the Neoclassical Age.

14. Who has written The Battle of the Books?

A. Alexander Pope
B. Jonathan Swift
C. Jonathan Swift
D. Joseph Addison

C. Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift wrote this short satire (1704) on the Ancients vs. Moderns controversy.
15. In whose plays do we find the anti-sentimental reaction ?

A. Wycherly
B. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
C. William Congreve
D. John Dryden

A. Wycherly
William Wycherley’s Restoration Comedies (like The Country Wife) were satirical and morally ambiguous, sharply contrasting with the overly moralistic Sentimental Comedies that followed.

16. Wordsworth’s Prelude is :

A. an elegy
B. a ballad
C. Autobiographical poem
D. a lyric

C. Autobiographical poem
The Prelude is William Wordsworth’s long, unfinished autobiographical epic poem subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind.

17. “God made the country and man made the town.” Who wrote this line?

A. Alexander Pope
B. Cowper
C. Wordsworth
D. Thomas Gray

B. Cowper
William Cowper wrote this famous line, contrasting the purity of nature with the corruption of urban life, in The Task.

18. Who is the author of The Four Ages of Poetry?

A. S. T. Coleridge
B. Matthew Arnold
C. Lord Byron
D. Shelley

D. Shelley
Thomas Love Peacock wrote the satirical essay The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), which P.B. Shelley responded to with his famous A Defence of Poetry.

19. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.” In which novel of Jane Austen does this sentence occur?

A. Pride and Prejudice
B. Emma
C. Sense and Sensibility
D. Mansfield Park

A. Pride and Prejudice
This famous opening line establishes the central themes of courtship and social convention in the novel.
20. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” A verse tale of Keats begins with this line. Identify the tale:

A. The Eve of St. Agnes
B. Endymion
C. Isabella
D. Lamia

B. Endymion
This is the famous opening line of John Keats’s lengthy poem Endymion (1818).

21. “God is in his Heaven / All is right with the world !” In which poem do these lines occur ?

A. “Rabbi Ben Ezra”
B. “My Last Duchess”
C. “The Ring and the Book”
D. “Pippa Passes”

D. “Pippa Passes”
These lines are the famous, and often ironic, expression of Victorian optimism in Robert Browning’s dramatic poem.

22. Which of the following arrangements of the authors is in the correct chronological order according to their dates of birth?

A. Thackeray, Browning, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold
B. Thackeray, Browning, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold
C. John Ruskin, Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Browning
D. Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Thackeray, Browning

B. Thackeray (1811), Browning (1812), John Ruskin (1819), Matthew Arnold (1822)
This is the correct chronological sequence by birth year.

23. Which of the following author-book pairs is correct?

A. Idea of a University – John Newman
B. Culture and Anarchy – Thomas Arnold
C. Sartor Resartus – Matthew Arnold
D. Life of Johnson – Lord Macaulay

A. Idea of a University – John Newman
The Idea of a University (1852) is a famous work on Catholic education by John Henry Newman.

24. In which poem do the following lines occur: “Winter is come and gone / But grief returns with the revolving year.”

A. The Scholar
B. The Scholar Gípsy
C. Thyrsis
D. Dover Beach

B. The Scholar Gípsy
25. Which of the following novels is called a “Novel without a Hero”?

A. Middlemarch
B. Vanity Fair
C. Oliver Twist
D. David Copperfield

B. Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray subtitled his satirical novel Vanity Fair (1848) “A Novel without a Hero,” as it lacks a conventionally virtuous male protagonist.

26. To which genre does The Murder in the Cathedral belong?

A. Tragedy
B. Melodrama
C. Closet Drama
D. Poetic Drama

D. Poetic Drama
T. S. Eliot’s play (1935), written in verse, is a leading example of the 20th-century movement to revive Poetic Drama.

27. “Nothing has changed since I began; / My eye has permitted no change.” These lines are from :

A. Seamus Heaney’s “Digging”
B. Ted Hughe’s “Hawk Roosting”
C. Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”
D. W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”

B. Ted Hughes’ “Hawk Roosting”
These lines are spoken in the uncompromising and arrogant voice of the Hawk, symbolizing pure power and self-will.

28. Scrutiny was an influential journal edited by :

A. F.R. Leavis
B. T.S. Eliot
C. I.A. Richards
D. Matthew Arnold

A. F.R. Leavis
The highly influential journal Scrutiny (1932–53) was founded and edited by F. R. Leavis, promoting his brand of severe moral and literary criticism.

29. Leopold Bloom and Molly are characters in :

A. James Joyce’s Ulysses
B. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
C. W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming
D. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

A. James Joyce’s Ulysses
Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom are the central figures whose day is chronicled in James Joyce’s great modernist epic.
30. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The above lines are an example of the following literary movement :

A. Surrealism
B. Futurism
C. Vorticism
D. Imagism

D. Imagism
This famous two-line poem by Ezra Pound (“In a Station of the Metro”) perfectly exemplifies the Imagist movement’s emphasis on clarity, precision, and the direct presentation of an image.

31. The term kitchen sink drama applies to the works of:

A. Arnold Wesker
B. John Osborne
C. Shelagh Delaney
D. John Arden

B. John Osborne
The term “Kitchen Sink Drama” was coined to describe the social realism of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956).

32. Which of the following is not a non-fictional work by V.S. Naipaul?

A. The Middle Passage
B. India: A Wounded Civilization
C. An Area of Darkness
D. A House for Biswas

D. A House for Biswas
A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is V. S. Naipaul’s most famous novel (fiction). The others are travelogues/essays.

33. Which of the following comes under the category of the campus novel ?

A. The Mill on the Floss
B. Middlemarch
C. Lucky Jim
D. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

C. Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim (1954) is a seminal example of the campus novel, satirizing academic life.

34. Name the Irish poet who has received the Nobel Prize :

A. Derek Mahon
B. Michael Longley
C. Seamus Heaney
D. Paul Muldoon

C. Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
35. Which of the following is not written by Iris Murdoch?

A. The Red Sea
B. A Severed Head
C. The Sea, The Sea
D. Under the Net

A. The Red Sea

36. The Last Labyrinth is a novel by :

A. R. K. Narayan
B. Arun Joshi
C. Bhabani Bhattacharya
D. Manohar Malgonkar

B. Arun Joshi
The Last Labyrinth (1981) is a novel by the Indian English writer Arun Joshi.

37. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a novel set in:

A. South Africa
B. Nigeria
C. Ghana
D. Kenya

B. Nigeria
The novel is set among the Igbo people of Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

38. Karnad’s Hayavadana is a play based on :

A. Greek myth
B. Thomas Mann’s Transposed Heads
C. Local Kannada folklore
D. The Mahabharata

B. Thomas Mann’s Transposed Heads
Girish Karnad’s play (1971) draws inspiration from both a Sanskrit tale and Mann’s novella The Transposed Heads.

39. Summer in Calcutta is a volume of poems by :

A. Nissim Ezekiel
B. Kamala Das
C. A. K. Ramanujan
D. Dom Moraes

B. Kamala Das
Summer in Calcutta (1965) is Kamala Das’s debut collection of confessional poetry.
40. Which of the following novels is by Patrick White?

A. Voss
B. The Eye of the Storm
C. The Solid Mandala
D. Riders in the Chariot

A. Voss
Voss (1957) is a major novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Australian author Patrick White.

41. Edward Said’s Orientalism is related to the following field of studies :

A. Post-colonial
B. Feminist
C. Marxist
D. Structuralist

A. Post-colonial
Said’s Orientalism (1978) is a foundational text of Post-colonial Theory, analyzing the Western construction of the Orient.

42. Who distinguished between the primary and secondary imagination?

A. I. A. Richards
B. S.T. Coleridge
C. William Wordsworth
D. John Keats

B. S.T. Coleridge
Coleridge made this famous distinction in Biographia Literaria. The Primary Imagination is the vital force of perception; the Secondary Imagination is the artistic, transformative power.

43. The New Critics believed that the literary text is :

A. a self-contained unit and is made up of only knowledge
B. merely a cultural product
C. only a reflection of society
D. mainly biography

A. a self-contained unit and is made up of only knowledge
New Criticism emphasizes close reading, viewing the text as an autonomous, self-contained object.

44. Name the writer who is associated with Reader Response theory

A. Cleanth Brooks
B. Stanley Fish
C. I. A. Richards
D. T. S. Eliot

B. Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish is a leading theorist of Reader-Response Criticism, focusing on the reader’s interpretive community and subjective experience.
45. The terms ‘writerly and readerly texts’ were used by

A. Jacques Lacan
B. Roland Barthes
C. Michel Foucault
D. Jacques Derrida

B. Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes introduced this distinction in S/Z, classifying texts by how much participation they demand from the reader.

46. Alliteration is the repetition of:

A. Consonant sounds
B. Vowel sounds
C. Metaphor
D. Imagery

A. Consonant sounds
Alliteration is the repetition of the initial consonant sound in nearby words (e.g., silly sally sat).

47. Show the rhyme scheme of Terza rima.

A. abba abba cde cde
B. abab cdcd efef gg
C. aba, bcb, cdc
D. abab bcbc cdc

C. aba, bcb, cdc
Terza rima is the interlocking three-line stanza form invented by Dante (e.g., lines 1 and 3 of the first stanza rhyme, and the second line rhymes with the first and third lines of the next stanza).

48. Dactyl is a metre with:

A. one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
B. two stressed syllables
C. two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable
D. one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable

A. one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
The Dactylic foot is defined by the pattern DUM-da-da (e.g., PO-e-try).

49. Free verse or vers libre is :

A. characterized by a fixed metrical pattern
B. not based on any metrical pattern
C. written in heroic couplets
D. always rhymed

B. not based on any metrical pattern
Free verse (vers libre) rejects traditional meter and rhyme, relying instead on rhythmic phrasing.
50. Shakespearean sonnet uses the following rhyme scheme :

A. abba cddc effe gg
B. abab, cdcd, efef, gg
C. abba abba cde cde
D. abab cdcd efef gh

B. abab, cdcd, efef, gg
The Shakespearean (or English) sonnet is divided into three quatrains and a final rhyming couplet.

Overview

This set of 50 multiple-choice questions begins with the Renaissance and the Medieval periods, covering authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, and Marlowe.

The quiz then moves to the 17th century, focusing on Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Milton, and Restoration comedy. Defoe, Pope, and Swift represent the 18th century.

The Romantic period is tested with questions on Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Jane Austen. The Victorian era follows, with authors such as Browning, Thackeray, and Matthew Arnold.

The 20th century is well covered, including Modernists such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ted Hughes. It also features post-war writers like John Osborne and Seamus Heaney. The list includes postcolonial figures such as Chinua Achebe and Kamala Das.

The final section shifts to literary theory, testing concepts from Coleridge, Roland Barthes, and Edward Said. It also tests technical knowledge of poetic devices, including alliteration, terza rima, and sonnet structures.

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