All Free English Literature MCQs with Answers

• A. a long verse
• B. a long narrative poem
• C. an overriding view
• D. an overstatement about something

Explanation: Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration used for emphasis or dramatic effect, such as saying ‘I have told you a thousand times.’ It does not…

• A. Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.
• B. True is it that we have seen betting days.
• C. Knowledge is power.
• D. None of these.

Explanation: “Knowledge is power” is conventionally associated with Francis Bacon, not Shakespeare.

• A. a poem
• B. a sonnet
• C. an image or dummy
• D. a lamentation

Explanation: An effigy is an image, statue, or dummy representing a person, often used symbolically or for public display.

• A. symbol
• B. Metaphor
• C. Simile
• D. Metonymy

Explanation: The phrase compares the speaker directly to a cloud using “as,” so it is a simile. A metaphor makes the comparison without “like” or “as.”

• A. a hat of a king
• B. a day dreamer
• C. a lotus eater
• D. an ideal state which does not exist in real

Explanation: Utopia means an imagined ideal society or state, derived from Thomas More’s fictional Utopia.

• A. a short poem
• B. a long narrative poem
• C. a historical poem
• D. a prose composition

Explanation: An epic is an extended narrative poem, usually dealing with heroic deeds, warfare, or the destiny of a people.

• A. a song of lamentation
• B. a song of pleasure
• C. a hymn
• D. a praiseworthy song

Explanation: An elegy is a poem or song of lamentation, traditionally written to mourn the dead or reflect on loss.

• A. modern mode of words
• B. up-to-date words
• C. literary words
• D. obsolete words

Explanation: Archaism means an old-fashioned or obsolete word or expression that is no longer common in current usage.

• A. characters in play
• B. animals in play
• C. sympathy to others
• D. arouse of pity and fear

Explanation: In Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, catharsis is the arousal and subsequent purification or release of pity and fear.

• A. a satiric caricature of the characters
• B. a drama
• C. a satiric person
• D. an allegorical statement

Explanation: Burlesque is a comic or satirical imitation that caricatures a person, style, or subject by exaggerating it.

• A. a fictional story of animal characters
• B. a short story
• C. a long narrative prose
• D. a soft style epic

Explanation: A beast fable is a fictional narrative in which animals act and speak like human beings, usually to convey a moral lesson.

• A. collection of poems
• B. collection of insects
• C. fish cultivation
• D. study of poetry

Explanation: An anthology is a selected collection of literary writings, and a poetry anthology collects poems.

• A. an idea about writing
• B. the choice of words
• C. choice of poem
• D. arrangement of the incidents

Explanation: A plot is the structured arrangement of the events or incidents in a story or play.

• A. Oxymoron
• B. Synaesthesia
• C. Sensuousness
• D. Contrast

Explanation: Synaesthesia combines sensations from different senses, as when a colour is described as “heard” or a smell as “seen.” Oxymoron instead…

• A. having no rhyming end
• B. having no rhythmic flow
• C. having no significance
• D. having no blanks in the verse

Explanation: Blank verse is unrhymed verse, traditionally written in iambic pentameter, so its defining feature is the absence of end rhyme.

• A. Fable
• B. Epic
• C. Elegy
• D. None of these

Explanation: An elegy is a poem of mourning or reflection on the death of a person, as in Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

• A. Elege
• B. Sonnet
• C. Ode
• D. Epic

Explanation: A sonnet is a fixed poetic form of fourteen lines, commonly arranged in an Italian or English rhyme scheme.

• A. Simile
• B. Conceit
• C. Metaphor
• D. Couplet

Explanation: The two lines form a rhyming pair, with wind and unkind creating the couplet.

• A. a pair of rhyming iambic pentameter
• B. a two line stanza
• C. a poem of lamentation
• D. a song for mourning

Explanation: A heroic couplet consists of two rhyming lines written in iambic pentameter, often expressing a complete thought.

• A. a thing stands for whole thing
• B. pity and fear
• C. Self-contradictory speech
• D. long speech

Explanation: Synecdoche uses a part to represent the whole, as in “hands” for workers, or sometimes the whole to represent a part.