English Literature: questions and answers

Correct answer: A) Herman Melville

Herman Melville wrote "Moby Dick", first published in 1851. It follows Captain Ahab's hunt for a white whale. Hawthorne wrote "The Scarlet Letter", Twain wrote "Huckleberry Finn", and Faulkner wrote "The Sound and the Fury", so none of them fits.

Correct answer: D) P.B. Shelley

P.B. Shelley wrote the line. It closes his "Ode to the West Wind" (1819), where winter stands for hard times and spring for renewal: bad days pass and better ones follow. Blake, Coleridge and Byron were Shelley's contemporaries but did not write this ode.

Correct answer: D) Denmark

Denmark. Shakespeare's "Hamlet" takes place mainly at Elsinore, the Danish royal castle, and Hamlet is the Prince of Denmark. Other countries are only mentioned: Laertes goes to France, and Hamlet is sent to England, but the action stays in Denmark.

Correct answer: A) P.B. Shelley

P.B. Shelley wrote "Ozymandias", a sonnet published in 1818. It describes a ruined statue of a once-mighty king in the desert, showing how power and pride fade with time. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats were fellow Romantics but did not write it.

Correct answer: C) poem

A poem. "No Second Troy" is a short lyric by W.B. Yeats, published in 1910. In it he compares Maud Gonne, the woman he loved, to Helen of Troy and asks how she could have acted otherwise, since there was no second Troy for her to burn.

Correct answer: D) Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy wrote "The God of Small Things", her first novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. It is set in Kerala, India. Thomas Hardy was a Victorian English novelist, and Jhumpa Lahiri and R.K. Narayan wrote other well-known Indian or diaspora fiction.

Correct answer: A) Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Brontë wrote "Jane Eyre", published in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. Her sister Emily wrote "Wuthering Heights", Jane Austen wrote "Pride and Prejudice", and Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein".

Correct answer: C) One Hundred Years of Solitude

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is by Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian writer, first published in Spanish in 1967. "A Passage to India" (E.M. Forster), "Sons and Lovers" (D.H. Lawrence) and "Pride and Prejudice" (Jane Austen) are all by English writers.

Correct answer: C) John Keats

John Keats is not modern. He was a Romantic poet who died in 1821, author of odes such as "To Autumn". Yeats, Auden and Eliot all wrote in the twentieth century and are counted among the main modern poets in English.

Correct answer: D) historical

Historical. Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (about 1599) dramatises real Roman events: the plot against Caesar, his murder in 44 BC and the civil war after it. It is also a tragedy, but among these options "historical" fits; it is not a comedy or a romance.

Correct answer: B) W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham. His story "The Ant and the Grasshopper" (1924) retells Aesop's fable about a hardworking ant and a carefree grasshopper, then twists the moral: the idle brother ends up richer. Maupassant and O. Henry wrote famous short stories, but not this one.

Correct answer: C) Ode to the West Wind

"Ode to the West Wind". These lines come from its fourth section, where the speaker, worn down by life, begs the wind to lift him like the leaf, wave and cloud it carries. Shelley wrote the ode in 1819. "The Cloud", "To a Skylark" and "Adonais" are other Shelley poems.