Which Middle English work is a frame narrative in which a company of pilgrims tell stories on the road to Canterbury?

The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer

Piers Plowman, by William Langland

Le Morte Darthur, by Thomas Malory

In which verse form did Milton write his epic Paradise Lost?

Rhymed heroic couplets, two lines of iambic pentameter rhyming aa bb

The nine-line Spenserian stanza

Terza rima, interlocking three-line stanzas

Poetry marked by elaborate intellectual conceits that yoke far-apart ideas through argument, as in the work of John Donne, is characteristic of which group?

The Augustan (Neoclassical) poets

Which of the following correctly matches a literary movement with a representative text or figure?

Romanticism — Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads

Metaphysical poetry — Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock

Modernism — Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene

Romanticism — Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads

Victorian realism — Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

The 1798 Lyrical Ballads, a landmark of English Romanticism, was jointly published by which two poets?

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning

Which sequence lists these periods of English literature in correct chronological order, earliest first?

Old English, Middle English, the Renaissance, the Romantic period, the Modernist period

Middle English, Old English, the Romantic period, the Renaissance, the Modernist period

Old English, Middle English, the Renaissance, the Romantic period, the Modernist period

The Renaissance, Old English, Middle English, the Modernist period, the Victorian period

Old English, the Renaissance, Middle English, the Victorian period, the Romantic period

F.O. Matthiessen's term 'the American Renaissance' refers to a flowering of American writing around 1850. Which group does it name?

Mid-century writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman

The African American writers of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes

The expatriate Lost Generation of the 1920s, such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald

The seventeenth-century Puritan writers of colonial New England

Mid-century writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman

Which novel, which allegorises India's independence through a child born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, won its author the Booker Prize?

Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie

The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

In a well-known debate about language, one African writer argued for appropriating and reshaping English to carry African experience, while another rejected English and chose to write in his mother tongue. Who held the first position?

Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who turned to writing in Gikuyu

Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart

Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet

V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born novelist

Matthew Arnold's idea of culture as 'the best which has been thought and said' and I.A. Richards's technique of 'practical criticism' both contributed chiefly to which development?

The rise of English as an academic discipline and of close reading

The founding of the Theatre of the Absurd as a mid-twentieth-century dramatic movement

The Harlem Renaissance as a flowering of African American poetry in the 1920s

The revival of Old English philology as the sole method of literary study

Which of the following are usually counted among Canadian writers in English?

Michael Ondaatje, long resident in Canada

Which of the following correctly describe intersections of literary study with allied disciplines?

Ecocriticism studies the relation between literature and the physical environment

Psychoanalytic criticism draws on the work of Freud and Jung

Marxist criticism reads literature in relation to class and the economic base

Ecocriticism studies the relation between literature and the physical environment

Psychoanalytic criticism draws on the work of Freud and Jung

Marxist criticism reads literature in relation to class and the economic base

Prosody is the branch of criticism that studies a nation's balance of payments

Wimsatt and Beardsley's 'intentional fallacy', a central idea of the New Criticism, names the mistake of:

Taking the author's intention or design as the standard for a poem's meaning or success, instead of the text itself

Judging a poem chiefly by the emotional effect it produces in its readers rather than by what the poem itself contains

Reading a poem closely, line by line, while declining to consult any information about the historical period in which it was written

Treating the imagery of a poem as symbolic or figurative instead of accepting it as literally true

Taking the author's intention or design as the standard for a poem's meaning or success, instead of the text itself

History of English Literature and Literary Studies

This chapter answers Section XH2.2 of the Humanities and Social Sciences (XH) paper, 'History of English Literature and Literary Studies': the English literary tradition from Chaucer to contemporary writing; the wider Anglophone literatures of Britain, America, Canada and the postcolonial world; the intersection of literature with political, social and intellectual movements; and the links between literary study and allied disciplines such as sociology, psychology, philosophy and the environment. XH2 English is one of the six optional sections of the paper, chosen at the time of application. The chapter maps the main periods and movements, their representative figures, and how the discipline of English studies itself took shape.

1. Periodisation: Chaucer to the contemporary

English literary history is conventionally cut into periods, each with a dominant temper. Old English verse (the epic Beowulf) gives way to Middle English, whose summit is Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a frame narrative of pilgrims. The Renaissance (Early Modern) brings Spenser's The Faerie Queene, the drama of Marlowe and Shakespeare, the Metaphysical poetry of Donne, and Milton's blank-verse epic Paradise Lost. The Restoration and eighteenth century are the age of Dryden, Pope and Swift and of the rise of the novel (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding).

The Romantic period (roughly 1798 to 1830) exalts imagination, nature and feeling in Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. The Victorian age (roughly 1837 to 1901) is the great age of the realist novel (Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontës, Hardy) and of Tennyson, Browning and Arnold in verse. Modernism (early twentieth century) breaks with realist convention in Eliot, Yeats, Joyce and Woolf, and the contemporary or postwar period runs, roughly, from the 1950s to today across many national literatures in English.

The contemporary period is plural. In Britain the postwar decades bring the controlled, sceptical verse of Philip Larkin and the 'Movement' poets, the 'Angry Young Men' and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) in the theatre, and the sparse, menacing drama of Harold Pinter; Ted Hughes and the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney renew the poetic line. The novel widens to include Golding, Murdoch and Angela Carter, then writers of migration and of black and Asian British experience such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith. The same decades see the rise of the Anglophone literatures treated below, so 'English literature' today names a global field, not an island one.

⚠️ Periods overlap and are made, not found

Period labels are later conveniences, not sharp walls. Writers straddle them (Hardy is a Victorian novelist but a twentieth-century poet), and dates are approximate. In an exam, use a period to place the dominant style and the key names, not to date a single year exactly.

A period and a landmark work or two
Period	Representative works
Old and Middle English	Beowulf; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Renaissance	Shakespeare's plays; Milton, Paradise Lost
Eighteenth century	Pope, The Rape of the Lock; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Romantic / Victorian	Lyrical Ballads; Dickens, Great Expectations; Tennyson, In Memoriam
Modernist	Eliot, The Waste Land; Joyce, Ulysses (both 1922)

2. Literary movements and their tenets

A movement is a shared set of aims and techniques, usually tied to a period. Renaissance humanism revived classical learning and placed human experience at the centre. The Metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Marvell) prized the intellectual conceit, yoking far-apart ideas through argument. Neoclassicism (Dryden, then the Augustans, above all Pope) valued order, wit, decorum and the heroic couplet, taking the ancients as models.

Romanticism reacts against neoclassical reason, prizing imagination, nature, the common life and strong feeling — Wordsworth's 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'.
Victorian realism depicts society in detail and with moral seriousness; Aestheticism (the 'art for art's sake' creed, linked with Pater and Wilde) later denies that art must teach.
Modernism answers a fractured world with fragmentation, myth, interiority and formal experiment (Pound's 'make it new'); Postmodernism then turns to irony, pastiche, self-reference and doubt about grand narratives.

🎯 Movements move by reaction

Each movement is partly an answer to the one before. Neoclassicism disciplines Renaissance exuberance; Romanticism rebels against neoclassical reason; Victorian realism steadies Romantic excess; Modernism breaks Victorian confidence; and Postmodernism doubts the modernist faith in form and depth. Reading a movement as a reaction makes its tenets far easier to hold than a bare list of dates.

3. American literature

American writing begins with Puritan verse and sermon, but comes of age around 1850 in what F.O. Matthiessen called the American Renaissance: the Transcendentalism of Emerson ('Self-Reliance') and Thoreau (Walden), the dark romance of Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) and Melville (Moby-Dick), and the new poetry of Whitman's free verse. Matthiessen's study centred on these five writers; Emily Dickinson's compressed lyrics belong to the same mid-century moment. Edgar Allan Poe shapes the modern short story and detective tale.

The later nineteenth century brings realism and naturalism (Mark Twain's vernacular Huckleberry Finn, Henry James's psychological novels). In the 1920s the expatriate Lost Generation (Hemingway, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) and the Southern modernism of Faulkner reshape the novel, while the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay) gives African American writing a landmark flowering. Postwar American literature ranges across the Beats, confessional poetry, and a diverse contemporary fiction.

American writing gave world literature several durable things: the modern short story and the detective tale (shaped by Poe), the vernacular novel that writes in the voices of ordinary speech (Twain), and free verse on Whitman's long, unmetred line.
It is also strongly regional and plural: the Southern tradition of Faulkner and later Flannery O'Connor, the African American tradition from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison, and immigrant and ethnic writing that keeps widening the canon.

4. Canadian, postcolonial and other Anglophone literatures

English is now a world literary language. Canadian writing includes Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale), Alice Munro, a master of the short story, and Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient). Postcolonial literatures write back to empire from the former colonies: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Wole Soyinka in Nigeria, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in Kenya, Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul in the Caribbean, Patrick White in Australia, and the Indian English novel of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.

What unites these scattered literatures is less a single style than a set of shared concerns: identity and belonging, language and power, migration and diaspora, and the rewriting of colonial history from the side of the colonised. Recognition has followed — Soyinka, Walcott, Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee are among the Nobel laureates, and the Booker Prize has gone repeatedly to writers from India, the Caribbean and Africa — so that the centre of gravity of writing in English is now plural rather than purely British.

ℹ️ The empire writes back

The phrase The Empire Writes Back, the title of a 1989 study by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, names a central idea of postcolonial literature: writers in the former colonies take the coloniser's language and forms and remake them to tell their own experience, contesting the centre from its own linguistic ground.

Some regions of Anglophone and postcolonial writing
Region	Representative writers
West Africa (Nigeria)	Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri
Caribbean	Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys
Canada	Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje
India (English)	R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy

5. Intersections with political, social and intellectual movements

Literature does not float free of history. The Reformation and the printing press fed Renaissance writing; the Enlightenment shaped the reason and satire of the eighteenth century; the French Revolution fired the first Romantics; the Industrial Revolution and its poverty are the subject of the Victorian 'condition of England' novel. The two World Wars and the collapse of old certainties underlie modernist fragmentation, and decolonisation, the civil rights movement and feminism reshaped the later twentieth-century canon.

This is why literary study reads texts alongside their moment. A Romantic lyric answers revolution and industrial change; a postcolonial novel answers empire and its end; women's and Dalit and working-class writing answers exclusion from the canon. Intellectual currents matter as much as events: Darwinian evolution unsettles Victorian faith, and psychoanalysis and Marxism give the twentieth century new ways to read the self and society.

ℹ️ Text and context, held together

A central skill in literary history is reading a text against its moment without reducing it to that moment. A Dickens novel is both a made thing with its own form and a response to industrial poverty and reform; a war poem is both an artefact and a piece of evidence. Holding both — the text's shape and its context — is what the historical study of literature trains.

6. Literary studies and allied disciplines

English became a university subject only in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Matthew Arnold argued that culture is 'the best which has been thought and said' and gave criticism a civilising mission; I.A. Richards developed practical criticism, and F.R. Leavis made close evaluative reading central. In America the New Criticism (Ransom, Brooks, Wimsatt and Beardsley) insisted on the words on the page and warned against the intentional and affective fallacies — judging a poem by the author's aim or the reader's response rather than by the text.

Literary study in relation to allied disciplines
Discipline	What the critical approach reads for
Sociology	Class, ideology and the social base (Marxist criticism, cultural materialism)
Psychology	The unconscious, desire and the self (psychoanalytic criticism after Freud and Jung)
Philosophy	Meaning, language and being (existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics)
Environment	The relation between literature and the physical world (ecocriticism)

Through the twentieth century the study of literature opened steadily onto neighbouring fields. Psychoanalysis offered a vocabulary for desire and the unconscious; Marxist and later cultural approaches read texts as part of their social and economic order; philosophy supplied questions about meaning, language and existence; and more recently ecocriticism brought the environment into reading. These are not rival subjects bolted on but ways of asking what a text does in the world, which is why English today borders sociology, psychology, philosophy and environmental study rather than standing apart from them.

Key takeaways

English literary history runs Old English (Beowulf), Middle English (Chaucer), the Renaissance (Shakespeare, Donne, Milton), the Restoration and eighteenth century (Dryden, Pope, Swift, the first novelists), the Romantic period, the Victorian age, Modernism and the contemporary. Period labels place a dominant style and key names, not an exact year.
Movements carry tenets: humanism (classical learning), Metaphysical conceit, Neoclassical order and the heroic couplet, Romantic imagination and nature, Victorian realism, Aestheticism's art for art's sake, modernist fragmentation and 'make it new', and postmodern irony and pastiche.
American literature matures in the American Renaissance of about 1850 (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman), moves through realism and naturalism (Twain, James), the Lost Generation and Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, to a diverse postwar writing.
English is a world literary language: Canadian (Atwood, Munro, Ondaatje) and postcolonial writing (Achebe, Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, Walcott, Naipaul, White, Rushdie, Roy) write back to empire, remaking the coloniser's language — the idea named by The Empire Writes Back (1989).
Literature intersects history: the Reformation, Enlightenment, French and Industrial Revolutions, the World Wars, decolonisation, civil rights and feminism each reshape what is written, and Darwinism, psychoanalysis and Marxism give new ways to read self and society.
English became a discipline through Arnold, I.A. Richards's practical criticism, Leavis, and the New Criticism's close reading (with its intentional and affective fallacies). Literary study connects to sociology (Marxist criticism), psychology (psychoanalytic), philosophy (existentialism, phenomenology) and the environment (ecocriticism).

Practice questions (17)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

Which Middle English work is a frame narrative in which a company of pilgrims tell stories on the road to Canterbury?
1. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
2. Piers Plowman, by William Langland
3. Le Morte Darthur, by Thomas Malory
4. Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Show answer
Answer: A — The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer's frame narrative of pilgrims travelling to Canterbury, each telling a tale. Piers Plowman is a Middle English dream-vision allegory, Le Morte Darthur is Malory's prose Arthurian romance, and Paradise Lost is Milton's seventeenth-century blank-verse epic — none of them is the Canterbury pilgrimage frame.
In which verse form did Milton write his epic Paradise Lost?
1. Rhymed heroic couplets, two lines of iambic pentameter rhyming aa bb
2. The nine-line Spenserian stanza
3. Blank verse
4. Terza rima, interlocking three-line stanzas
Show answer
Answer: C — Blank verse
Paradise Lost is in blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — and Milton defended the choice against the fashion for rhyme. Heroic couplets are the Augustan staple (Pope), the Spenserian stanza belongs to The Faerie Queene, and terza rima is Dante's interlocking form; none is the form of Paradise Lost.
Poetry marked by elaborate intellectual conceits that yoke far-apart ideas through argument, as in the work of John Donne, is characteristic of which group?
1. The Pre-Raphaelite poets
2. The Metaphysical poets
3. The Augustan (Neoclassical) poets
4. The Lake (Romantic) poets
Show answer
Answer: B — The Metaphysical poets
The elaborate conceit, built by argument, is the signature of the Metaphysical poets such as Donne, Herbert and Marvell. The Pre-Raphaelites are a Victorian movement, the Augustans prized smooth decorum and the couplet, and the Romantic Lake poets prized feeling and nature over Donne's intellectual wit, so none of those names the conceit tradition.
Which of the following correctly matches a literary movement with a representative text or figure?
1. Metaphysical poetry — Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock
2. Modernism — Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene
3. Romanticism — Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads
4. Victorian realism — Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
Show answer
Answer: C — Romanticism — Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads is the founding text of English Romanticism, so that pairing is correct. The Rape of the Lock is an Augustan mock-epic, not Metaphysical; The Faerie Queene is a Renaissance poem, not Modernist; and The Canterbury Tales is medieval, not Victorian — each of the other three pairs a movement with a text from the wrong period.
The 1798 Lyrical Ballads, a landmark of English Romanticism, was jointly published by which two poets?
1. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley
2. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
3. John Keats and Leigh Hunt
4. Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning
Show answer
Answer: B — William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lyrical Ballads (1798) was the joint work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and its 1800 Preface became a Romantic manifesto. Byron and Shelley are second-generation Romantics who did not write it; Keats and Hunt and the Victorians Tennyson and Browning come later still, so the other pairings are chronologically or factually wrong.
Which sequence lists these periods of English literature in correct chronological order, earliest first?
1. Middle English, Old English, the Romantic period, the Renaissance, the Modernist period
2. Old English, Middle English, the Renaissance, the Romantic period, the Modernist period
3. The Renaissance, Old English, Middle English, the Modernist period, the Victorian period
4. Old English, the Renaissance, Middle English, the Victorian period, the Romantic period
Show answer
Answer: B — Old English, Middle English, the Renaissance, the Romantic period, the Modernist period
The correct order is Old English, then Middle English, the Renaissance, the Romantic period and the Modernist period. The other sequences reverse Old and Middle English, or drop the Renaissance before medieval writing, or put the Victorian period before the Romantic — each breaks the known chronology.
The dramatic monologue, in which a single speaker unwittingly reveals his own character to a silent listener, is most closely associated with which Victorian poet?
1. Gerard Manley Hopkins
2. Matthew Arnold
3. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
4. Robert Browning
Show answer
Answer: D — Robert Browning
The dramatic monologue is most closely associated with Robert Browning, whose speakers expose themselves as they talk. Tennyson wrote a few such poems and is the strongest distractor, but the form is identified above all with Browning; Hopkins and Arnold are not known for it.
The Scarlet Letter, a novel of guilt and judgement in Puritan New England, was written by which American author?
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne
2. Herman Melville
3. Mark Twain
4. Henry James
Show answer
Answer: A — Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter (1850) is by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville wrote Moby-Dick, Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, and James wrote The Portrait of a Lady; all are major American novelists, but none wrote The Scarlet Letter.
F.O. Matthiessen's term 'the American Renaissance' refers to a flowering of American writing around 1850. Which group does it name?
1. The African American writers of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes
2. The expatriate Lost Generation of the 1920s, such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald
3. The seventeenth-century Puritan writers of colonial New England
4. Mid-century writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman
Show answer
Answer: D — Mid-century writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman
Matthiessen's American Renaissance names the burst of major writing around 1850 by Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman. The Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation are both 1920s phenomena, and the Puritans are two centuries earlier, so all three are the wrong era; the clue is the date, around 1850.
Which novel, which allegorises India's independence through a child born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, won its author the Booker Prize?
1. The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
2. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
3. Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
4. The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
Show answer
Answer: C — Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie, ties its narrator Saleem to the midnight of Indian independence and won the Booker Prize. The God of Small Things also won the Booker but is a different story; Things Fall Apart is set in colonial Nigeria; and The English Patient is Ondaatje's war novel — none turns on a child born at the stroke of independence.
In a well-known debate about language, one African writer argued for appropriating and reshaping English to carry African experience, while another rejected English and chose to write in his mother tongue. Who held the first position?
1. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who turned to writing in Gikuyu
2. Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart
3. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet
4. V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born novelist
Show answer
Answer: B — Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe argued that the African writer could remake English to bear the weight of African experience rather than abandon it. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o took the opposite view, rejecting English for Gikuyu, so he held the second position; Walcott and Naipaul are associated with the Caribbean and not with this particular English-versus-mother-tongue argument.
Matthew Arnold's idea of culture as 'the best which has been thought and said' and I.A. Richards's technique of 'practical criticism' both contributed chiefly to which development?
1. The rise of English as an academic discipline and of close reading
2. The founding of the Theatre of the Absurd as a mid-twentieth-century dramatic movement
3. The Harlem Renaissance as a flowering of African American poetry in the 1920s
4. The revival of Old English philology as the sole method of literary study
Show answer
Answer: A — The rise of English as an academic discipline and of close reading
Arnold's elevation of culture and Richards's practical criticism helped make English a university discipline grounded in close reading of texts. The Theatre of the Absurd is mid-century drama, the Harlem Renaissance is a movement in African American writing, and far from reviving philology as the sole method, these critics shifted study toward evaluative reading of literature itself.
Which of the following are usually classified as Modernist writers active in the early twentieth century?
1. T.S. Eliot
2. Virginia Woolf
3. Geoffrey Chaucer
4. James Joyce
Show answer
Answer: A — T.S. Eliot; B — Virginia Woolf; D — James Joyce
Eliot, Woolf and Joyce are central figures of early twentieth-century Modernism. Chaucer is a medieval (Middle English) poet of the fourteenth century, centuries before Modernism, so he is the one that does not belong.
Which of the following writers are associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s?
1. Langston Hughes
2. Zora Neale Hurston
3. Claude McKay
4. Herman Melville
Show answer
Answer: A — Langston Hughes; B — Zora Neale Hurston; C — Claude McKay
Hughes, Hurston and McKay are leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s flowering of African American writing. Melville belongs to the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance (he wrote Moby-Dick in 1851), so he is the writer who does not fit.
Which of the following are usually counted among Canadian writers in English?
1. Margaret Atwood
2. Alice Munro
3. Salman Rushdie
4. Michael Ondaatje, long resident in Canada
Show answer
Answer: A — Margaret Atwood; B — Alice Munro; D — Michael Ondaatje, long resident in Canada
Atwood, Munro and Ondaatje are central figures of Canadian writing in English. Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist, not a Canadian writer, so he is the one that does not belong among them.
Which of the following correctly describe intersections of literary study with allied disciplines?
1. Ecocriticism studies the relation between literature and the physical environment
2. Psychoanalytic criticism draws on the work of Freud and Jung
3. Marxist criticism reads literature in relation to class and the economic base
4. Prosody is the branch of criticism that studies a nation's balance of payments
Show answer
Answer: A — Ecocriticism studies the relation between literature and the physical environment; B — Psychoanalytic criticism draws on the work of Freud and Jung; C — Marxist criticism reads literature in relation to class and the economic base
Ecocriticism (environment), psychoanalytic criticism (psychology, after Freud and Jung) and Marxist criticism (sociology, class and economic base) are all genuine intersections of literary study with allied fields. Prosody is the study of versification and metre, not of a balance of payments, so that statement is false.
Wimsatt and Beardsley's 'intentional fallacy', a central idea of the New Criticism, names the mistake of:
1. Judging a poem chiefly by the emotional effect it produces in its readers rather than by what the poem itself contains
2. Reading a poem closely, line by line, while declining to consult any information about the historical period in which it was written
3. Treating the imagery of a poem as symbolic or figurative instead of accepting it as literally true
4. Taking the author's intention or design as the standard for a poem's meaning or success, instead of the text itself
Show answer
Answer: D — Taking the author's intention or design as the standard for a poem's meaning or success, instead of the text itself
The intentional fallacy is the error of using the author's intention or design as the standard for a poem's meaning or value, when the finished text is what a critic can actually examine. Judging by the effect on readers is a separate mistake that the same critics call the 'affective fallacy', which is why it tempts, but it is not the intentional fallacy. Close reading without historical information is the New Critics' own method, not a fault they diagnose, and the literal or symbolic status of imagery is not what the term concerns.