English Literature: 40 MCQs with Answers

The word ‘cuisine’ is a French loan word and its accepted Received Pronunciation transcription is /kwɪˈziːn/. The initial letter ‘c’ is realised as the voiceless velar plosive /k/, which is immediately followed by the labio-velar approximant /w/, so the cluster is /kw/. The middle vowel is the short lax /ɪ/, while the stressed second syllable carries the long close front vowel /iː/ followed by the alveolar nasal /n/. The primary stress falls on the second syllable, which is typical of many French borrowings retained in English.

In Gordon Cook and Alan East’s narrative ‘We’re Not Afraid to Die… if We Can All Be Together’, the family has survived a savage storm in the Southern Indian Ocean and is desperately searching for the tiny island of Ile Amsterdam. Jonathan, the narrator’s six-year-old son, is the first to sight land and cries out that it is there in front of them, as big as a battleship. The stark outline of the island rising out of the sea signals rescue after days of pumping water, and the comparison conveys both its size and the children’s relief.

In Pearl S. Buck’s story ‘The Enemy’, Dr Sadao Hoki, a Japanese surgeon, finds a wounded American prisoner of war washed ashore near his house during the Second World War. Torn between his professional duty as a doctor and his patriotic duty to his country, Sadao himself remarks that the kindest thing would be to put the man back into the sea. The line captures his inner conflict, since sheltering an enemy soldier could cost him and his family their lives. Ultimately his humanity prevails and he operates on the man and helps him escape.

An iamb is the commonest metrical foot in English verse and consists of two syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed, giving a rising rhythm often described as da-DUM. Pentameter means that the line contains five such feet, so an iambic pentameter line has ten syllables with stress falling on every second one. Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ is a standard illustration. Because this pattern closely resembles the natural cadence of spoken English, it became the staple metre of the sonnet, blank verse and much dramatic poetry.

Kamala Das, who later wrote in Malayalam under the pen name Madhavikutty, first serialised her autobiography in Malayalam as ‘Ente Katha’, which literally means ‘My Story’. She subsequently rewrote it in English, and the English version appeared in 1976 under that translated title. The book created a sensation for its unflinching treatment of a woman’s emotional and sexual life within a conservative society, and it remains one of the most discussed autobiographies in Indian writing. Her poem ‘My Mother at Sixty-six’ is prescribed in the school syllabus.

William Douglas begins his autobiographical essay ‘Deep Water’ by recalling his terror of water and by quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous line that all we have to fear is fear itself. The allusion frames the whole essay, because Douglas is describing how a near-drowning at the Y.M.C.A. pool left him with a paralysing phobia and how he later conquered it with the help of an instructor and sheer determination. The chapter is thus a study in the psychology of fear, and Roosevelt’s words supply its guiding idea.

‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ records the life of Annelies Marie Frank, universally known as Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl who hid with her family in a concealed annexe in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. She began the diary on her thirteenth birthday in 1942 and addressed her entries to an imaginary friend she called Kitty. The family was betrayed in 1944 and Anne died at Bergen-Belsen. Her father Otto, the only survivor, published the diary in 1947, and an extract titled ‘From the Diary of Anne Frank’ is prescribed in school.

Guy de Maupassant published the story in 1884 under the French title ‘La Parure’, which means ‘the ornament’ or ‘the set of jewels’; in English it is universally known as ‘The Necklace’. It tells of Mathilde Loisel, a discontented clerk’s wife who borrows a diamond necklace to attend a ball, loses it, and spends ten years of grinding poverty repaying the loan taken to replace it, only to learn at the end that the original was an imitation worth almost nothing. The story is a classic example of the ironic twist ending.

W. B. Yeats’s ‘When You Are Old’ contrasts two kinds of love. Many admirers loved the woman’s ‘moments of glad grace’ and her physical beauty, an attachment that faded as her face changed with age. Only one man loved the ‘pilgrim soul’ in her and even the sorrows of her changing face, a love that outlasted her youth. The poem therefore turns on the fleeting nature of beauty set against the enduring nature of genuine love. Death is not its subject; the ageing of the woman is only the vantage point from which she is asked to look back.

In the phrase ‘when you are old and grey’ the word ‘grey’ names the colour of the hair, yet it is used to stand for the whole condition of old age. Naming a thing by one closely associated attribute in this way is metonymy. There is no contradiction in the phrase, so it is not an oxymoron; there is no reference to an external person, myth or event, so it is not an allusion; and no word is used with a double meaning, so it is not a pun. Yeats uses this compact image to open the poem with a picture of physical decline.