Essential notes for MA English entrance test, OU

If winter comes, can spring be far behind? These lines reveal Shelly's optimism (Ode to West Wind)


1500 – 1600 The Renaissance
1600 – 1798 The Neoclassical Period
1660 – 1700 The Restoration Period
1798 – 1832 The Romantic Period
1832 – 1901 The Victorian Period
1901 – 1914 The Edwardian Period


Victoria Period: Tennyson and Browing

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. - Oscar Wilde

Doone's Good Marrow, Canonisation

Dryland's “Absalom and Achitophel

Congrev's “Way of the World”

Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews

Wordsmith's Ode to an Intimations of Immortability

Coleridg's The Rime of the Ancient Marines

Keats – Ode to Autumn

Shelly – Ode to the West wind

Dickens – Hard Times

Lawrence's – Sons and Lovers

Yeats – Sailing to Byzantium

Eliot – The Love song of J Alfred Prufrock, Hollow Men – 1925

Francis Bacon is considered as the Father of the English Essay.

A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines usually in iambic pentameter with a definite rhyme scheme.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour, sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity – Albert Einstein

Beckett – Waiting for Godot

Marlowe's Dr Faustus

Francis Bacon - “Of Friendship”, “Of Studies”

Shakespeare wrote
38 plays
154 sonnets
5 long poems
His plays are generally classified into
histories (10)
comedies (13)
tragedies (10)
romances (5)
The downfall is due to a mixure of the hero's own faults/weaknesses such as:
revenge and indecision : Hamlet
ambition and desire : Macbeth
jealousy: Othello (Osmania University MA English test 2008)
anger and lack of judgment: King Lear

Francis Bacon, alongwith Galileo is known in literature as “The great anti-Aristotelians who created the modern scientific view of nature”.

King Lear characters:
Lear: King of Britain
Gonerill, Regan, Cordelia: Lear's daughters
Fool: A clown in Lear's service
Kent: King Lear's loyal and selfless companion
Edger: The banished son of Gloucester and brother to the villain Edmund

Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

Mill on the Floss – George Eliot

“Newspeak” coined by George Orwell in his novel 1984. It means deliberately misleading ambiguous language, especially by government officials.

The seventeenth century is also referred to as the Age of Milton and the Age of Dryden

The Ballad of Father Gilligan – Yeats

Full title of Othello...
Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare

Robert Burns is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement

The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot

Charles Dickens – victorian novelist

Oliver Twist deals with London crime

Nicholas Nickleby with brutal Yorkshire schools

Old curiosity shop is the tale of an unhappy girl and her gambling grand father

Barnby Rudge, a story of the Lord Gordon riots in London

A Tale of Two cities, a story of the French revolution.

Dryden was the outstanding writer of the Restoration period.

The Romantic Age:-
William Blake
Robert Burns
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
George Gordon
Lord Byron
Peraj Byssche Shelley
John Keats

Victorian Poetry and Prose
Thomas Carlyle
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Elizabeth Barrett Browining
Robert Browning
Mathew Arnold
Water Peter
Oscar Wilde

The Victorian Novel:-
William Makepeace Thackeray
Charles Dickens
Anthony Trollope
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
George Eliot
Samuel Butler

Modern Poetry:-
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Rudyard Kipling
WB Yeats
TS Eliot
WH Auden
Dylan Thomas

The Modern Novel and Drama:-
Thomas Hardy
Henry James
George Bernard Shaw
Joseph Conrad
EM Forster
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
DH Lawrence

Fire on the Mountain – Anita Desai

Identity and Violence – Amartya Sen

Victorian Writer – Swinburne

Scott, Byron and Goethe were inspired by Romantic Movement

The Prelude – Wordsworth

Kubla Khan – ST Coleridge

Sage of Highgate – ST Coleridge

Sordellow – Browing

A Tale of Two Cities started with the famous sentence - “It was best of times, it was worst of times.”

At one point in The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot asserts that “character is destiny”.

Middle march - George Eliot

The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling

Caesar and Cleopatra – George Bernard Shaw

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

George Bernard Shaw thesis:- Poverty is a crime because it robs people of self-respect and self belief.

Everything exists, nothing has value – A Passage to India

The busy bee has no time for sorrow. The most sublime act is to set another before you. The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest – William Blake

Gravity's Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any university can teach – Oscar Wilde

Seventh and last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Maquez

Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching – Oscar Wilde