Literary theory forms a core component of competitive examinations in English literature, such as the UGC NET, SET, and university Ph.D. entrance tests. It encompasses structured analytical frameworks ranging from classical poetics and Russian formalism to contemporary deconstruction, postcolonialism, and cultural materialism. Mastery of these critical schools requires a deep understanding of key theorists, foundational texts, paradigm shifts, and specialized terminology. Practicing targeted multiple-choice questions enables aspirants to test their conceptual clarity, tackle assertion-reason items, and navigate rigorous exam patterns successfully.
1. Who is traditionally regarded as the first Western literary critic, known for evaluating poets like Aeschylus and Euripides in his comedy 'The Frogs'?
Correct Answer: c) Aristophanes
Explanation:
Aristophanes engaged in early literary criticism and evaluation of Greek dramatists in his satirical play 'The Frogs' (405 BC).
2. Which ancient philosopher famously banished poets from his ideal republic on the grounds that poetry is twice removed from truth?
Correct Answer: b) Plato
Explanation:
In 'The Republic', Plato critiqued poetry through his theory of mimesis (imitation), arguing that art presents an illusion of truth and appeals to emotion rather than reason.
3. In 'Poetics', which Greek philosopher defended poetry by defining tragedy as an imitation of an action that brings about catharsis?
Correct Answer: a) Aristotle
Explanation:
Aristotle's 'Poetics' is foundational to Western literary criticism, establishing concepts like hamartia, peripeteia, and catharsis.
4. Whose 'Ars Poetica' established the classical maxim that literature should aim 'to instruct and to delight'?
Correct Answer: b) Horace
Explanation:
Horace's 'Ars Poetica' exerted immense influence on Renaissance and neoclassical literary theory, emphasizing decorum and the dual purpose of art.
5. Which ancient treatise introduced the concept of the 'Sublime' as that which elevates style and inspires awe?
Correct Answer: a) On the Sublime
Explanation:
'On the Sublime' (attributed to Longinus) focuses on greatness of thought, noble diction, and passionate composition.
6. Who wrote 'An Essay of Dramatic Poesy' (1668), establishing the tradition of modern English literary criticism?
Correct Answer: b) John Dryden
Explanation:
John Dryden is often called the 'Father of English Criticism'; his essay uses a debate format to examine classical versus modern drama.
7. Which Elizabethan courtier wrote 'An Apology for Poetry' to counter puritanical attacks on art?
Correct Answer: b) Sir Philip Sidney
Explanation:
Sir Philip Sidney argued that poetry superiorly combines philosophy's abstract precepts with history's concrete examples to morally improve mankind.
8. Who compiled the monumental 'Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets' (1779-1781)?
Correct Answer: b) Samuel Johnson
Explanation:
Dr. Samuel Johnson's biographical and critical evaluations in 'Lives of the Poets' cemented his status as the premier critic of the English Augustan age.
9. In 'Biographia Literaria' (1817), which Romantic critic distinguished between 'Imagination' and 'Fancy'?
Correct Answer: b) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Explanation:
Coleridge's distinction between primary imagination, secondary imagination, and fancy revolutionized Romantic aesthetic theory.
10. Who wrote the 1800 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads', defining poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'?
Correct Answer: a) William Wordsworth
Explanation:
Wordsworth's Preface is a core manifesto of English Romanticism, advocating for everyday language and democratic subject matter.
11. Which Victorian critic defined poetry as 'a criticism of life'?
Correct Answer: b) Matthew Arnold
Explanation:
Matthew Arnold's cultural and literary essays championed high seriousness and the 'touchstone method'.
12. What is Matthew Arnold's 'touchstone method' in literary criticism?
Correct Answer: b) Using short, classic passages from acknowledged masters to test the real power and value of other poetry
Explanation:
Arnold suggested holding up brief, exemplary passages of great masters as touchstones to evaluate the genuine substance and style of other poets.
13. Who was the leading figure of English Aestheticism, famous for the phrase 'art for art's sake'?
Correct Answer: b) Walter Pater
Explanation:
Walter Pater urged readers to prioritize intense aesthetic experiences and exquisite moments above moral instruction.
14. Which modernist critic wrote 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919), introducing the 'objective correlative'?
Correct Answer: b) T. S. Eliot
Explanation:
T. S. Eliot redefined modern criticism by arguing that poetry is an escape from personality within historical tradition.
15. Who coined the phrase 'Make it new!' and spearheaded the Imagist movement?
Correct Answer: b) Ezra Pound
Explanation:
Ezra Pound's critical essays and mentorship of modernists shaped precise imagery and avant-garde techniques.
16. Which school of American criticism focused on close reading, irony, paradox, and intrinsic text unity?
Correct Answer: a) New Criticism
Explanation:
New Critics like Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom treated literary texts as autonomous objects of art.
17. Who wrote 'The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry' (1947)?
Correct Answer: b) Cleanth Brooks
Explanation:
Cleanth Brooks defended poetic complexity, arguing against the 'heresy of paraphrase' and highlighting irony and paradox.
18. Which Russian Formalist critic introduced the concept of 'defamiliarization' (ostranenie)?
Correct Answer: b) Viktor Shklovsky
Explanation:
Shklovsky argued that art strips away habitual perception, making familiar things strange so we experience them anew.
19. Which Soviet theorist developed the concepts of 'dialogism', 'polyphony', and 'carnivalization'?
Correct Answer: b) Mikhail Bakhtin
Explanation:
Mikhail Bakhtin emphasized that language is inherently social, multivocal, and dialogic.
20. Who founded structuralist narratology and analyzed 'functions' in fairy tales in 'Morphology of the Folktale'?
Correct Answer: b) Vladimir Propp
Explanation:
Vladimir Propp analyzed Russian folktales to isolate 31 invariant narrative functions and recurring character roles.
21. Which French cultural theorist famously announced 'The Death of the Author' in 1967?
Correct Answer: b) Roland Barthes
Explanation:
Roland Barthes argued that authorial intent dissolves upon publication, allowing multiple meanings to be actualized by the reader.
22. Who developed the philosophical method of 'deconstruction' with works like 'Of Grammatology' (1967)?
Correct Answer: b) Jacques Derrida
Explanation:
Jacques Derrida showed how texts inevitably undermine their own foundational premises through internal contradictions and différance.
23. Which psychoanalytic critic re-read Freud through structuralist linguistics, asserting that 'the unconscious is structured like a language'?
Correct Answer: b) Jacques Lacan
Explanation:
Jacques Lacan revolutionized psychoanalytic criticism by mapping Freudian concepts onto Saussurean linguistics.
24. Who wrote 'The Madwoman in the Attic' (1979), examining 19th-century literature by women through the anxiety of authorship?
Correct Answer: b) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Explanation:
Gilbert and Gubar explored how Victorian women writers grappled with patriarchal literary confinement.
25. Which feminist critic coined the term 'gynocriticism' in 'A Literature of Their Own' (1977)?
Correct Answer: b) Elaine Showalter
Explanation:
Elaine Showalter divided feminist criticism into feminist critique (women as readers) and gynocriticism (women as writers).
26. Who authored 'Orientalism' (1978), analyzing how Western discourses constructed the 'Orient' as exotic and inferior?
Correct Answer: b) Edward Said
Explanation:
Edward Said's 'Orientalism' inaugurated postcolonial studies by exposing the link between Western knowledge production and imperial power.
27. Which postcolonial theorist introduced the concepts of 'mimicry', 'hybridity', and the 'Third Space'?
Correct Answer: b) Homi K. Bhabha
Explanation:
Homi K. Bhabha utilized post-structuralist tools to analyze ambivalence, colonial mimicry, and cultural hybridity.
28. Who wrote the influential essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1988)?
Correct Answer: b) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Explanation:
Gayatri Spivak challenged Western academic assumptions about speaking for marginalized subaltern subjects.
29. Which Marxist critic wrote 'The Political Unconscious' (1981), famously declaring 'Always historicize!'?
Correct Answer: b) Fredric Jameson
Explanation:
Fredric Jameson integrated structuralism, psychoanalysis, and political economy into postmodern literary critique.
30. Who developed 'cultural materialism' in British literary and cultural studies with works like 'Culture and Society'?
Correct Answer: b) Raymond Williams
Explanation:
Raymond Williams examined how literature and culture reflect changing socio-economic structures.
31. Which 1980s movement associated with Stephen Greenblatt emphasized that texts are embedded in networks of power and social practices?
Correct Answer: b) New Historicism
Explanation:
New Historicism explores the circulation of social energy, power, and subversion in literary texts.
32. Who pioneered 'Reader-Response Criticism' with works like 'Is There a Text in this Class?' (1980)?
Correct Answer: b) Stanley Fish
Explanation:
Stanley Fish argued that meaning is constructed by the shared conventions of 'interpretive communities'.
33. Which German aesthetician developed 'Reception Theory' focusing on the 'horizon of expectations'?
Correct Answer: b) Hans-Robert Jauss
Explanation:
Hans-Robert Jauss introduced the 'horizon of expectations' to explain how a literary work's reception shifts across history.
34. Who wrote 'The Act of Reading' (1978), exploring the 'gaps' (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) that readers fill in narratives?
Correct Answer: a) Wolfgang Iser
Explanation:
Wolfgang Iser focused on the phenomenological interaction between text and reader, emphasizing narrative indeterminacy.
35. Which critic wrote 'The Rhetoric of Fiction' (1961), popularizing the 'implied author' and 'unreliable narrator'?
Correct Answer: b) Wayne C. Booth
Explanation:
Wayne C. Booth revived interest in authorial technique, moral values, and narrative reliability.
36. Who classified characters in 'Aspects of the Novel' (1927) into 'flat' and 'round'?
Correct Answer: b) E. M. Forster
Explanation:
E. M. Forster defined flat characters as built around a single idea and round characters as complex and evolving.
37. Which French structuralist categorized narrative 'order', 'duration', 'frequency', 'mood', and 'voice' in 'Narrative Discourse'?
Correct Answer: b) Gérard Genette
Explanation:
Gérard Genette's taxonomy of narrative discourse remains a cornerstone of modern structuralist narratology.
38. Who wrote 'Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature' (1946) while exiled in Turkey?
Correct Answer: a) Erich Auerbach
Explanation:
Erich Auerbach traced how everyday reality and human life have been represented across Western literature.
39. Which Frankfurt School philosopher co-authored 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' and coined the term 'culture industry'?
Correct Answer: b) Theodor Adorno
Explanation:
Theodor Adorno critiqued mass-produced art under capitalism as promoting conformity and pacification.
40. Who wrote the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936), introducing artistic 'aura'?
Correct Answer: b) Walter Benjamin
Explanation:
Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction destroys the unique 'aura' of original artworks.
41. Which Hungarian Marxist critic championed 19th-century realism and criticized modernist alienation?
Correct Answer: b) Georg Lukács
Explanation:
Georg Lukács defended critical realism, arguing that great literature captures the totality of social historical forces.
42. Who formulated the concept of 'hegemony' to explain how ruling classes maintain power through ideological consent?
Correct Answer: b) Antonio Gramsci
Explanation:
Antonio Gramsci's cultural hegemony heavily influenced cultural studies and Marxist literary criticism.
43. Which French Marxist philosopher introduced 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (ISAs) and 'interpellation'?
Correct Answer: b) Louis Althusser
Explanation:
Louis Althusser argued that literature and ideology 'interpellate' individuals into subjects.
44. Who wrote 'Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste' (1979), analyzing cultural capital and class taste?
Correct Answer: b) Pierre Bourdieu
Explanation:
Pierre Bourdieu introduced 'cultural capital' and 'habitus', showing how aesthetic tastes mirror socioeconomic hierarchies.
45. Which French theorist examined power as diffuse, disciplinary, and productive in 'Discipline and Punish'?
Correct Answer: b) Michel Foucault
Explanation:
Michel Foucault's work on power/knowledge and discourse radically altered literary and historical analysis.
46. Who defined postmodernism as 'incredulity toward metanarratives' in 1979?
Correct Answer: b) Jean-François Lyotard
Explanation:
Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the postmodern breakdown of grand unifying historical and philosophical theories.
47. Which theorist developed the concepts of 'simulacra' and 'simulation', arguing that culture replaces reality with hyperreal signs?
Correct Answer: b) Jean Baudrillard
Explanation:
Jean Baudrillard argued that media creates a 'hyperreality' where representations precede and replace actual reality.
48. Who wrote 'The Society of the Spectacle' (1967), critiquing how modern capitalism reduces life to mediated images?
Correct Answer: b) Guy Debord
Explanation:
Guy Debord analyzed how commodities and spectacles dominate social and cultural life.
49. Which foundational ecocritic wrote 'The Environmental Imagination' (1995)?
Correct Answer: b) Lawrence Buell
Explanation:
Lawrence Buell's scholarship on Thoreau and environmental narrative helped launch modern ecocriticism.
50. Who coined the term 'ecocriticism' in his 1978 essay 'Literature and Ecology'?
Correct Answer: b) William Rueckert
Explanation:
William Rueckert first applied ecological concepts to literary criticism in 1978.
51. Which critic wrote 'Epistemology of the Closet' (1990), establishing frameworks for queer literary theory?
Correct Answer: b) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Explanation:
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued that Western culture is fundamentally structured by the dynamic of the closet and secrecy.
52. Who authored 'Gender Trouble' (1990), introducing the concept of gender performativity?
Correct Answer: b) Judith Butler
Explanation:
Judith Butler argued that gender is not a fixed internal essence, but a performance constituted through stylized repetition.
53. Who coined the term 'Practical Criticism' through his 1929 book evaluating student responses to anonymous poems?
Correct Answer: b) I. A. Richards
Explanation:
I. A. Richards pioneered close reading by having students analyze poems stripped of authorial and historical metadata.
54. Which student of I. A. Richards wrote 'Seven Types of Ambiguity' (1930)?
Correct Answer: b) William Empson
Explanation:
William Empson explored how poetic language achieves rich complexity through various forms of ambiguity.
55. Which 18th-century Scottish philosopher wrote 'Of the Standard of Taste' (1757)?
Correct Answer: b) David Hume
Explanation:
David Hume argued that experienced critics develop refined aesthetic taste based on delicacy, practice, and comparison.
56. Who wrote 'A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful' (1757)?
Correct Answer: b) Edmund Burke
Explanation:
Edmund Burke's empirical aesthetics of the sublime heavily influenced Romantic literature.
57. Which German philosopher formalized the Sublime and Beautiful in 'Critique of Judgment' (1790)?
Correct Answer: b) Immanuel Kant
Explanation:
Immanuel Kant explored aesthetic judgment and the overwhelming nature of the mathematical and dynamical sublime.
58. Who wrote 'Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature' (1809–1811), introducing German Romantic criticism to England?
Correct Answer: b) August Wilhelm Schlegel
Explanation:
August Wilhelm Schlegel's lectures shaped European Romantic interpretations of Shakespeare.
59. Which American poet wrote 'The Philosophy of Composition' (1846) and pioneered formalist aesthetic analysis?
Correct Answer: b) Edgar Allan Poe
Explanation:
Poe argued that works should be written backward from a single pre-determined effect, emphasizing formal unity.
60. Who wrote 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' (1864), arguing for 'disinterestedness'?
Correct Answer: b) Matthew Arnold
Explanation:
Arnold defined criticism as 'a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world'.
61. Which French critic championed environmental, racial, and historical determinism ('race, milieu, and moment')?
Correct Answer: b) Hippolyte Taine
Explanation:
Hippolyte Taine claimed that literature can be explained by race, milieu, and historical moment.
62. Who was the towering figure of 19th-century French literary journalism, known for his biographical method in 'Causeries du lundi'?
Correct Answer: b) Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Explanation:
Sainte-Beuve's biographical method focused intensely on the author's personality.
63. Which French novelist wrote 'Contre Sainte-Beuve' (Against Sainte-Beuve), separating the author from their work?
Correct Answer: b) Marcel Proust
Explanation:
Marcel Proust argued that an author's true self is found in their creative work, not their biographical personality.
64. Who wrote 'The Sacred Wood' (1920) and established the 'disassociation of sensibility'?
Correct Answer: b) T. S. Eliot
Explanation:
Eliot diagnosed a split between thought and feeling in English poetry after the 17th century.
65. Who wrote 'The Common Reader' (1925) and championed experimental modern fiction against Edwardian realism?
Correct Answer: b) Virginia Woolf
Explanation:
Virginia Woolf critiqued materialist novelists for focusing on externals rather than consciousness.
66. Who co-founded the Scrutiny movement with F. R. Leavis and published 'Fiction and the Reading Public' (1932)?
Correct Answer: b) Queenie Dorothy Leavis
Explanation:
Q. D. Leavis analyzed mass culture and literary standards alongside her husband F. R. Leavis.
67. Which American critic wrote 'The Liberal Imagination' (1950), defending complexity and irony in literature?
Correct Answer: b) Lionel Trilling
Explanation:
Lionel Trilling explored the moral life and cultural contradictions in literature against rigid dogmatism.
68. Who founded the 'Chicago School' of criticism (Neo-Aristotelianism) and edited 'Critics and Criticism' (1952)?
Correct Answer: b) R. S. Crane
Explanation:
R. S. Crane and the Chicago Critics revived pluralistic Aristotelian formal analysis.
69. Which Canadian critic wrote 'The Anatomy of Criticism' (1957), creating an archetypal taxonomy of literature?
Correct Answer: b) Northrop Frye
Explanation:
Northrop Frye combined myth, archetype, and structural genre theory into a comprehensive system.
70. Who wrote 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' (1949), mapping the monomyth of the hero's journey?
Correct Answer: b) Joseph Campbell
Explanation:
Joseph Campbell drew on Jungian archetypes to outline the universal narrative structure of the hero's journey.
71. Which psychoanalytic thinker introduced the concept of the collective unconscious and archetypes?
Correct Answer: b) Carl Jung
Explanation:
Carl Jung posited that shared psychic structures populate myths and literature across all human cultures.
72. Who authored 'The Second Sex' (1949), declaring 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'?
Correct Answer: b) Simone de Beauvoir
Explanation:
Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist masterpiece established the social construction of gender.
73. Which critic wrote 'Sexual Politics' (1970), analyzing patriarchal ideologies in male modernist writers?
Correct Answer: b) Kate Millett
Explanation:
Kate Millett's 'Sexual Politics' launched second-wave feminist literary criticism.
74. Who wrote 'The Female Eunuch' (1970), critiquing how patriarchal culture suppresses female autonomy?
Correct Answer: b) Germaine Greer
Explanation:
Germaine Greer's international bestseller critiqued conventional marriage and nuclear family structures.
75. Which French feminist theorist championed 'écriture féminine' in 'The Laugh of the Medusa'?
Correct Answer: b) Hélène Cixous
Explanation:
Hélène Cixous urged women to write through the body, breaking patriarchal constraints.
76. Who wrote 'This Sex Which Is Not One' (1977) and critiqued phallocentrism in psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: b) Luce Irigaray
Explanation:
Luce Irigaray analyzed how psychoanalytic and philosophical traditions reduce female desire.
77. Which semiotician introduced the concepts of the 'semiotic' (chora) and the 'symbolic' in poetic language?
Correct Answer: b) Julia Kristeva
Explanation:
Julia Kristeva explored how avant-garde literature disrupts symbolic order by tapping into pre-oedipal rhythmic drives.
78. Who wrote 'Black Skin, White Masks' (1952) and 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1961)?
Correct Answer: b) Frantz Fanon
Explanation:
Frantz Fanon's analyses of racism and colonial subjugation shaped postcolonial studies.
79. Which Kenyan novelist wrote 'Decolonising the Mind' (1986), advocating for indigenous languages?
Correct Answer: b) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Explanation:
Ngũgĩ argued that language carries culture and worldview, prompting his shift to Gikuyu.
80. Who co-authored 'The Empire Writes Back' (1989), codifying postcolonial literary theory?
Correct Answer: b) Bill Ashcroft
Explanation:
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin co-authored 'The Empire Writes Back', codifying the subversion of imperial language.
81. Which Caribbean intellectual pioneered studies on diaspora, exile, and cultural representation at Birmingham?
Correct Answer: b) Stuart Hall
Explanation:
Stuart Hall founded British cultural studies, analyzing representation, identity, and ethnicity.
82. Who wrote 'The Practice of Everyday Life' (1980), exploring how ordinary people subvert dominant institutional spaces?
Correct Answer: b) Michel de Certeau
Explanation:
Michel de Certeau analyzed tactics used by consumers to subvert powerful institutional strategies.
83. Which Marxist critic wrote 'Towards a Sociology of the Novel' (1964), developing genetic structuralism?
Correct Answer: b) Lucien Goldmann
Explanation:
Lucien Goldmann connected literary text structures to the worldview of specific social classes.
84. Who authored 'A Theory of Literary Production' (1966), examining how literature works on ideology?
Correct Answer: b) Pierre Macherey
Explanation:
Pierre Macherey argued that texts have 'silences' where ideology breaks down and reveals itself.
85. Which British Marxist critic wrote 'Literary Theory: An Introduction' (1983)?
Correct Answer: b) Terry Eagleton
Explanation:
Terry Eagleton's overview charted the rise of English studies and major critical theories from a leftist perspective.
86. Who wrote 'Understanding Media' (1964), coining the phrase 'The medium is the message'?
Correct Answer: b) Marshall McLuhan
Explanation:
Marshall McLuhan's media ecology theories transformed how critics analyze print and electronic media.
