All Free English Literature MCQs with Answers

• A. human nature
• B. God's will
• C. society itself
• D. the Church

Explanation: More presents social injustice as the product of human-made institutions, especially unequal property laws, poverty, and punishment.

• A. Cervantes
• B. Machiavelli
• C. Poliziano
• D. Thomas More

Explanation: Thomas More wrote Utopia, published in Latin in 1516. It uses an imagined commonwealth to examine political, economic, and social problems…

• A. Mary Barton
• B. Ruth
• C. Cranford
• D. North and SouthExplore Top Audiobooks

Explanation: Mary Barton, published in 1848, was Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel and portrays the hardships of Manchester's working class.

• A. Anthony Trollope
• B. Charles Dickens
• C. John Ruskin
• D. Friedrich Engels

Explanation: Anthony Trollope is associated with the comfortable, commercially prosperous middle-class world of mid-Victorian England.

• A. It did not carry the burden of an august tradition like poetry.
• B. It was a popular form whose market women could enter easily.
• C. It was seen as a frivolous form where one shouldn't make serious statements about society.
• D. all but C

Explanation: The novel lacked poetry's weighty classical tradition, had a broad commercial readership, and was often dismissed as a light or frivolous…

• A. Dombey and Son
• B. Little Dorrit
• C. Our Mutual Friend
• D. Edwin Drood

Explanation: Edwin Drood was Dickens's final novel, but he died in 1870 before completing it, leaving the mystery of its intended conclusion…

• A. Cranford
• B. Hard Times
• C. Emma
• D. Great Expectation

Explanation: Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill are important characters in Jane Austen’s Emma.

• A. Cranford
• B. Hard Times
• C. Ruth
• D. Vanity Fair

Explanation: Coketown, an imaginary industrial town dominated by factories and pollution, is the setting of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times.

• A. Cranford
• B. North and South
• C. Ruth
• D. Mary Barton

Explanation: Cranford presents a comic, socially observant community whose relationships and misunderstandings invite comparison with Shakespeare's…

• A. Emma
• B. Jane Eyre
• C. Vanity Fair
• D. Wuthering Heights

Explanation: Heathcliff is the passionate and vengeful central character of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

• A. the rich and the poor
• B. Anglicans and Methodists
• C. England and Ireland
• D. Britain and Germany

Explanation: Disraeli’s “Two Nations” are the rich and the poor, whose separation exposes the social inequalities of Victorian England.

• A. the representation of a large and comprehensive social world in realistic detail
• B. a surrealist exploration of alternate states of consciousness
• C. the attempt of a protagonist to define his or her place in society
• D. A and C

Explanation: Victorian novels commonly present society in broad realistic detail while showing a protagonist trying to discover a suitable place within…

• A. Graham Greene
• B. Anthony Powell
• C. Evelyn Waugh
• D. William Golding

Explanation: Graham Greene combined Catholic concerns with experience as an intelligence officer and film critic, often placing morally troubled…

• A. Vanity Fair
• B. Mill on the Floss
• C. Northanger Abbey
• D. Pickwick Papers

Explanation: Thackeray subtitled Vanity Fair “A Novel without a Hero” because it presents a morally compromised society rather than a conventionally…

• A. Mary Collins
• B. Marian Evans
• C. Lara Evans
• D. Clare Reeve

Explanation: George Eliot was the pen-name of Marian Evans, more fully known as Mary Ann or Marian Evans.

• A. Silas Marner
• B. Emma
• C. Hard Times
• D. Adam Bede

Explanation: Dunstan Cass is the selfish and dishonest brother of Godfrey Cass in George Eliot’s Silas Marner.

• A. Paradise Lost
• B. Divine Comedy
• C. Utopia
• D. Pilgrims Progress

Explanation: William Makepeace Thackeray took the title Vanity Fair from John Bunyan’s allegorical work The Pilgrim’s Progress.

• A. Gothic novel
• B. Autobiographical novel
• C. Historical novel
• D. Picaresque novel

Explanation: Romola is set in Florence during the late fifteenth century and presents historical figures and events from that period.

• A. Hunnish epic
• B. Gothic fiction
• C. epistolary novel
• D. meta-novel

Explanation: Walpole's 1764 novel combined medieval setting, supernatural events, and terror, establishing the Gothic tradition.

• A. Too many of its readers were women.
• B. It required less skill than other genres.
• C. It lacked the classical pedigree of poetry and drama.
• D. all of the above

Explanation: Early novel critics attacked it on all three grounds: it attracted women readers, seemed easier to write than established genres, and…