Free Literary Criticism MCQs with Answers

• A. The unifying power
• B. Ability to coin new word
• C. Power of imagination
• D. Negative capability

Explanation: Coleridge used “esemplastic” for the imagination’s power to shape diverse elements into a coherent unity.

• A. Elaine Showalter
• B. Ellen Moors
• C. Julia Kristeva
• D. Kate Millet

Explanation: Elaine Showalter coined and developed gynocriticism, which studies women's writing and the female literary tradition.

• A. Three
• B. Four
• C. Five
• D. Six

Explanation: Longinus identifies five principal sources of sublimity: greatness of thought, strong emotion, noble diction, dignified composition, and…

• A. Greek
• B. Latin
• C. Hebrew
• D. Italian

Explanation: Longinus's On the Sublime survives as a Greek treatise, probably from the first century.

• A. Arnold
• B. Shelley
• C. Byron
• D. Hazlitt

Explanation: Matthew Arnold described Keats’s letters as resembling the letters of a surgeon’s apprentice, pointing to their direct, personal, and…

• A. Carl Jung
• B. Harold Bloom
• C. Ernest Jones
• D. Erik Erikson

Explanation: Ernest Jones wrote Hamlet and Oedipus in 1949, applying Freudian psychoanalysis to Shakespeare’s tragedy.

• A. Henry Howard
• B. Roger Ascham
• C. John Skelton
• D. Stephen Gosson

Explanation: Sidney’s Defence of Poesy responds chiefly to Stephen Gosson’s attack on poetry in The School of Abuse.

• A. Reader Response Criticism
• B. Formalist Criticism
• C. Historical Criticism
• D. These are all equally subjective

Explanation: Reader-response criticism gives primary importance to the reader's interpretation, so different readers may produce different meanings.

• A. William Tyndale
• B. Roger Ascham
• C. Stephen Gosson
• D. Henry Howard

Explanation: Stephen Gosson was an Elizabethan Puritan critic who attacked poetry in The Schoole of Abuse, calling poets 'fathers of lies' and 'schools…

• A. Coleridge
• B. Addison
• C. Arnold
• D. Eliot

Explanation: Coleridge distinguished poetry from a poem by treating poetry as a broader imaginative activity or quality, while a poem is a particular…

• A. 48
• B. 50
• C. 52
• D. 54

Explanation: Johnson's Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets contains lives of 52 poets.

• A. drama
• B. music
• C. dance
• D. none

Explanation: Plato compares poetry with painting because both imitate appearances, whereas Aristotle gives poetry a closer relationship to music…

• A. Psychological Critics
• B. Feminist critics
• C. Formalist critics
• D. Marxist critics

Explanation: The New Critics focused on the text itself, analysing its language, structure, imagery and tensions rather than the author's psychology or…

• A. Comedy
• B. Tragedy
• C. Satire
• D. Melodrama

Explanation: In Aristotle's theory, tragedy arouses pity and fear and achieves catharsis through these emotions.

• A. Sophocles
• B. Plautus
• C. Plato
• D. Critus

Explanation: Plato was Socrates’ most famous and influential disciple, later presenting Socratic ideas in dialogues such as the Apology and Republic.

• A. Art presents only part of the world
• B. Art describes only what appears and not what is real
• C. Art tells lies about the world
• D. Art is an exaggeration of the world

Explanation: For Plato, reality consists in ideal Forms, whereas art imitates the visible world, which is already an imperfect copy of those Forms.

• A. It represents the nature
• B. It contributes to the spiritual growth of people
• C. It shows a tragedy
• D. It imitates nobility

Explanation: Plato generally distrusts imitation, but he allows art a positive role when it morally educates people and supports their spiritual…

• A. Carlyle
• B. Ruskin
• C. T. S. Eliot
• D. F. R. Leavis

Explanation: T. S. Eliot regarded Arnold less as an original literary critic than as a propagandist who promoted the value of literature and culture.

• A. Historical
• B. Formalist
• C. Mimetic
• D. All of these

Explanation: The historical approach interprets a work through its author’s biography, period, social conditions, and intellectual background.

• A. 3
• B. 2
• C. 4
• D. 6

Explanation: Aristotle uses the term katharsis twice in the Poetics, most notably in the definition of tragedy and in his later discussion of its…