UGC-NET (English P- II & III)

Important Questions for UGC-NET English, Paper II and III

• “Pride and Prejudice,” “Here is a limited world; but she interprets it with the penetrating insight of the creative artist”.
• In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, Wordsworth considers the Platonic notion that humans forget all their knowledge at birth and spend the remainder of their lives recollecting. Vaughan’s Retreat also celebrates the childhood, which is a second race in life only to sojourn in earthly life for few days and  who can enjoy an ecstatic communion with nature. Wordsworth carried forward the same idea here.
• Lord Byron, The most colorful of the English romantic poets, took part in actual war as commander in chief of the Greek forces during the struggle against the Ottoman Empire for independence.
• Lamb seldom permitted his profounder views of life to appear above the humorous, pathetic and ironical surface of his writings. Above all Charles Lamb was a refined humanist whose smile could be both satirist and tender.’ Lambs’ essays are lyric poems in prose.’
• ‘The Waste Land’ is both a public or private poem. T. S. Eliot claims universally for his (The Wasteland).
• In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet a long-standing feud between the Capulets and Montagues keeps the young lovers, Juliet Capulet and Romeo Montague, apart.
• In soliloquy “To Be or Not to Be” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet reveals that his self-doubt and inability to avenge his father’s death have led him to the brink of suicide.
• The antique language of the pastorals, which was adopted by Spenser of set purpose, was condemned by his patron Sidney.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge crafted lyric verse with dreamlike imagery and deep symbolism. His Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner are two exquisite examples of the genre.
•  It is true that Some Critics object to Shelley as being a difficult poet. For this several reasons might be given. Firstly, to follow his meaning with ease and security requires a nimble and poetic intelligence, which comparatively few readers are possessed of. Secondly, the cloudy metaphysics, clothed in magnificent words, and so remote it seems from all earthly interests.
• Charles Dickens ’ A Tale of Two Cities takes place during the French Revolution. The book’s opening lines set a tone of ambiguity and theme of duality.
• In Thackeray's Vanity Fair we find these two women characters. Becky Sharp is amusing shrewd while and Amelia Sedley sharply contrasting is a colorless type of girl, negatively good. (IMP)
• Robert Browning’s interest in psychological analysis of characters from different countries. Browning had a “robust optimism” unlike the other Victorian poets who were worriers and doubters.
• Keats was a romantic poet who believed in the importance of sensation and its pleasures which included taste, touch and smell as well as hearing and sight. Keats had himself dictated the epitaph he wanted carved on his headstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
• In their personal lives as well as in their work, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who for some most typify the romantic poet, wrote resoundingly in protest against social and political wrongs and in defense of the struggles for liberty in Italy and Greece.
• Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years, the longest reign in the history of England. Those years, from 1837 to 1901, became known as the Victorian era and were marked by a deeply conservative morality and the rise of the middle class.
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser was published in 1590 Books I-III, Books IV-VI in 1596. Here Spenser invented a unique nine-line stanza, now known as the Spenserian stanza, for use in the poem.
• Metaphysical poetry It a kind of  the early 17th century poetry with an unsentimental, subtly intellectual style which often addressed complex topics, avoided regular meter, and infused their works with unconventional imagery is known as metaphysical poetry. John Donne is the master of this school. His Holy Sonnets is a great example of this genre.
• Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda is a of romantic type; Thackeray's Vanity Fair is a fine piece of realism.
• THE LITTLE MAN by JOHN GALSWORTHY has a subtitle A FARCICAL MORALITY IN THREE SCENES
• Pope’s Essay on Man EPISTLE I: bears the title Of the Nature and State of Man, With Respect to the Universe
• Imagery or figurative language helps us to form a picture of what the author is trying to present.
• Milton’s masterpiece “Paradise Lost”  dramatizes the Biblical account of humanity’s banishment from Paradise and in Paradise Regained Jesus triumphantly resists Satan and regains the Paradise lost by Adam and Eve.
• In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth, a spirited girl, is “prejudiced” against the wealthy landowner Fitzwilliam Darcy, scorning his lofty attitudes and “pride.”
• Christopher Marlowe, considered the greatest English dramatist before William Shakespeare, was the first English playwright to compose in blank verse.
• Stock says of ‘The Second Coming’ that in this poem Yeats sets his own age in the perspective of eternity and condenses a whole philosophy of history into it so that it has the force of Prophecy’.
• Swift is a misanthrope in his ‘Gulliver’S Travels’. Swifts’Gulliver’s Travel is a ‘mock utopia’. Gulliver’s Travels as an entertaining political story, but it became very popular as a tale for young people. It also expresses despair or that its import is nihilistic, is radically to misread the book.
• In  'Tess', Hardy has rebelled against tradional and orthodox views'. Hardy is here neither a feminist, nor a misogynist, but a realist.
• The 19th century Romantic Movement has been variously interpreted as ‘the convalescence of the feeling of beauty’, ‘renaissance of wonder’, ‘split religion’ and ‘erotic nostalgia’.
•  ‘Art for God's sake ‘  phrase best characterizes the late-nineteenth century aesthetic movement which widened the breach between artists and the reading public, sowing the seeds of modernism.
• The early-twentieth-century thinker Sigmund Freud is associated with enormously influential perspective or practice psychoanalysis. He had a major impact on early-twentieth-century writers, leading them to reimagine human identity in radically new ways.
• Lawrence very closely describes the working life of the labourers in“Sons and Lovers”. In D. H. Lawrence’s work men and women of our times have found their own restlessness most accurately mirrored.
• In spite of diverse material and frequent digressions, Byron’s Don Juan does have a strong principle of thematic unity exemplified by the recurring motif of appearance versus reality. It is a success because it is a satirical panorama of the ruling classes of his time.
• Vijay Tendulkar is  known for his plays, Silence the Court is in Session, Ghāshirām Kotwāl , and Sakhārām Binder . He has received awards including the Padma Bhushan, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, Filmfare Award, Saraswati Samman, Kalidas Samman and Maharashtra Gaurav Puraskar.
• Legouis says “Wordsworth saw Nature and Man with new eyes”.
• John Dryden’s late seventeenth century mock-epic satire, Mac Flecknoe has a  stage like setting in the city.
• Shelley’s weaknesses as a writer have always been evident; rhetorical abstraction; intellectual arrogance; and movements of intense self-pity. But in great poems like the "West Wind" or great prose works like "Defence", it is precisely these limitations that he transcends, and indeed explodes.
• Mathew Arnold describes Shelley “a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”.
•  “In Hamlet we see a great, an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it.”  Coleridge.
• Ben Jonson criticized his friend William Shakespeare, for errors and carelessness.
• In Mac Flecknoe John Dryden satirized Thomas Shadwell, a rival poet who sought to equal Dryden’s preeminent stature. (M.IMP)
• An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope appeared in 1711. Written in heroic couplet the poem professes to the gospel of wit and nature as it applies to the literature of the age.
• Phillis Wheatley’s poetry (Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral) begins a powerful African American tradition in American poetry.
• Dunciad (a satire) is the longest of pope’s work.
• The age of Pope is called classical age, because the poets of that age aimed at clerical perfection of form. They wanted to achieve the formal beauty which the poet of Rome attained under Emperor Augustus. That is why the age is treated a part of the Augustus age is English literature
• In 1713 Joseph Addison produced the tragedy, Cato written in blank-verse. He also attempted an opera Rosamond in 1707. The name of his prose-comedy is The Drummer (1715).
• Steele’s best prose comedies – The Funeral, The Lying Lover, The Tender Husband and The Conscious Lover.
• The chief works of Swift- A Tale of Tube – religious satire; Gulliver’s Travels – political satire; The Battle of Books – satirical humour
• Roger de Coverly is an imaginary eccentric country Knight who frequented the spectator club in London. Around the Knight were grouped a number of contrasted characters, also members of the mythical club. Such were Will Honeycomb, a middle aged bean; sir Andrew Freeport, a city merchants captain Sentery, a soldier, and mr. Spectator, a shy reticent person, who bears the resemblance to Addison himself.
• The Tattler – 1709;   The Rambler (1750); The Spectator – 1711  (These are the periodicals started by Addison and Steele)
• Edward Gibbon (1737-94) wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire(1776). (M.IMP)
• James Boswell (1740-95) wrote “The life Samuel Johnson” in 1791.
• The first daily news paper that beganfrom premises in Fleet Street in 1702 wasThe Daily Courant.
• Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews(1742) is a parody of the novel Pamela by Richardson.
• John Gay‘s (1685-1732) last play The Beggar’s Opera appeared in 1728. It is a social satire.
• In “The Spectator” total 555 essays were published.
• Dr. Johnson’s last literary work is “The lives of the poets.”
• Voltaire regarded Alexander Pope as “the best poet of England and at present of all the world” .
• Pope:  yes I am proud ; I must be proud to see men not afraid of God , afraid of me.
• The characters from Tom Jones: Tom Jones, Sophie Western, Squire Western ,Miss Western, Lady Bellaston Molly Seagrim Squire Allworthy, Lord Fellamar ,Mrs. Waters, Jenny Jones, Fitzpatrick ,Mrs. Miller,  Mrs. Wilkins,  Thwackum,  Mr. Seagrim , Bridget Allworthy , Black George , Mrs. Fitzpatrick,  Partridge , Square,  Honour,  Blifil,  Lawyer Dowling,  Lieutenant, Landlady at George Inn , Susan , MacLachlan,  The jailor at Newgate ,Mrs. Seagrim ,Parson Supple ,Northerton.
• At the age of 26 Addison was the secretary for war in the Tory Government.
• The hero of the poem the Campaign is Marlborough.
• Account of the Greatest English poetry was written by Addison.
• Henry Fielding’s last work was a diary the name of which is Voyage to Lisbon. His last novel is Amelia.
• Swift: I heartily hate and detest that animal called man.
• Pigmies: Lilliputians; Giants – Brobdingnagian; moonstruck Philosophers – Laputans; Race of horses-Houyhnhnm (Gulliver’s Travels ).
• The Dunciad was modeled on Mac Flecknoe.
• Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was originally intended as a satire on humankind. It is also considered a children’s story.
• Pope’s An Essay on Criticism includes the famous line, “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
• The story of Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was based on the actual adventures of a marooned sailor, Alexander Selkirk.
• Samuel Johnson was nicknamed both Dictionary Johnson and the Great Cham (Khan) of Literature for his worthy contribution of literature.
• Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker jointly published The Roaring Girle in 1610.
• Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea’ is perhaps his most sustained attempt to unite the actual and symbolic under one continuous narrative roof.
•  “Jane Austen’s view of life is the view of the eighteenth century civilization of which she was the last exquisite blossom. One might call it the moral realistic view. Jane Austen was profoundly moral.” (David Cecil).
• The word novel derives from the Italian novella and the French nouvelle, means a short story. In broad defining it is a piece of prose, in which certain characters, true to life, pass through certain well-defined experiences so interwoven as to form a plot.