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English Literature Basics: Authors, Works and Literary Terms
English papers in recruitment exams are mostly grammar and vocabulary, but nearly every set slips in one or two literature questions. They are pure recall: a title is given and the author is asked, or a poem is described and its form is asked. A candidate who has never studied literature can still score here with one compact list.
That list has three parts. First, the British authors exams return to: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hardy and Orwell. Second, the Indian writers in English, from Rabindranath Tagore and his Gitanjali to R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Ruskin Bond, and the later Booker winners. Third, the literary terms: sonnet, ode, elegy, ballad, epic and satire, and the difference between autobiography and biography.
The method is to tie each name to one signature work and each term to one defining feature.
1. Who wrote the epic Paradise Lost?
2. How many lines does a sonnet have?
3. The fictional town of Malgudi was created by:
4. The novel Untouchable (1935) was written by:
5. A poem written to mourn the death of a person is called:
6. George Orwell's Animal Farm, which mocks a revolution that turns into tyranny, is best described as a:
7. Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 chiefly for:
8. A book in which a person writes the story of his or her own life is called: