Practice · MCQ

Practice MCQs

Ten questions, instant answers, full reasoning. Nothing is recorded — this is a mirror, not a test.

Set 1 — Mixed revision, NET level

Ten questions across criticism, medieval literature, the Romantics, modernism and postcolonial writing. Tap an option and the answer appears immediately, with the reasoning. Nothing is recorded and nothing is submitted anywhere — this is for you, not for a leaderboard.

These are practice questions written for revision. They are not reproduced from any past examination paper; for those, see Previous Year Questions.

Question 1

Who coined the critical term objective correlative?

Answer: T. S. Eliot — Eliot introduced the phrase in his essay on Hamlet, arguing that emotion in art must be expressed through a set of objects or events that evoke it.

Question 2

In Aristotle's Poetics, the sudden reversal of a situation is called

Answer: Peripeteia — Peripeteia is the reversal of fortune; anagnorisis is the recognition or discovery that often accompanies it.

Question 3

The pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales set out from

Answer: The Tabard Inn — Chaucer's General Prologue gathers the company at the Tabard Inn in Southwark before the journey to Canterbury.

Question 4

The phrase willing suspension of disbelief comes from

Answer: Coleridge's Biographia Literaria — Coleridge used it in Biographia Literaria while describing the division of labour between himself and Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads.

Question 5

A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821, is by

Answer: P. B. Shelley — Shelley wrote it in 1821; it was published posthumously in 1840. Sidney's earlier work is An Apology for Poetry, which is a different text.

Question 6

The essay The Death of the Author was written by

Answer: Roland Barthes — Barthes argued that a text's meaning is produced in reading rather than fixed by the author's intention.

Question 7

Things Fall Apart takes its title from a poem by

Answer: W. B. Yeats — The title comes from Yeats's The Second Coming, which Achebe also quotes as an epigraph.

Question 8

The rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefgg belongs to the

Answer: Shakespearean sonnet — Three alternating quatrains closing in a couplet is the English or Shakespearean form. The Spenserian links its quatrains: ababbcbccdcdee.

Question 9

The narrator of the inner story in Heart of Darkness is

Answer: Marlow — Marlow tells the Congo narrative aboard the Nellie to an unnamed listener, who frames the tale for the reader.

Question 10

Beowulf survives in a single manuscript known as

Answer: The Nowell Codex — The poem survives in the Nowell Codex, bound in the Cotton manuscript Vitellius A. xv, damaged by fire in 1731.

Tap an option to begin

What to do with a wrong answer

Do not simply read the explanation and move on — that produces the comfortable feeling of learning without much of the substance. Close the page, and say the correct answer out loud along with one sentence of reasoning. If you cannot produce the sentence, you have recognised the answer rather than learned it.

Then write the question into your error notebook and return to it in three days. Questions you get wrong twice are the ones that will appear in the examination, because that is the sort of luck examinations run on.

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Practice MCQs

Set 1 — Mixed revision, NET level

What to do with a wrong answer

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