Free Literary Criticism MCQs with Answers

• A. Plato
• B. Aristotle
• C. Horace
• D. Longinus

Explanation: Ars Poetica is Horace’s verse treatise on poetic art and literary principles.

• A. Aristotle
• B. Plato
• C. Pope
• D. Stephen Gosson

Explanation: Stephen Gosson attacks poetry in The School of Abuse and calls it a “mother of lies.” Plato also criticizes poetry as deceptive, but this…

• A. The Function of Criticism
• B. The Study of Poetry
• C. Preface to Eighteen Fifty Three poems
• D. Essay on Wordsworth

Explanation: Arnold makes this argument in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” where he presents creative and critical powers as necessary…

• A. Hellenic
• B. Hellenistic
• C. Renaissance
• D. Graeco-Roman

Explanation: Plato and Aristotle belong to the Hellenic, or classical Greek, phase of literary criticism.

• A. Deconstructionism
• B. Formalist Criticism
• C. Structuralism
• D. Mimetic Criticism

Explanation: Deconstructionism questions stable meaning and rejects the idea that language transparently refers to a fixed external reality.

• A. Mimetic
• B. Psychological
• C. Historical/Biographical
• D. Mythological/Archetypal

Explanation: The mythological or archetypal approach looks for recurring myths, symbols, and archetypes across cultures and periods.

• A. 1817
• B. 1818
• C. 1718
• D. 1717

Explanation: Coleridge's Biographia Literaria was published in 1817. It is a major work of Romantic criticism, discussing imagination, poetry, and…

• A. Disintrestedness
• B. Intresedness
• C. Purification
• D. Civilization

Explanation: Arnold’s ideal critic must be ‘disinterested’, meaning free from personal, political, or practical bias while judging literature.

• A. Aristotle
• B. Longinus
• C. Aristophanes
• D. Socrates

Explanation: Aristotle was Plato’s most illustrious pupil and later developed major ideas in logic, ethics, politics, and literary theory.

• A. Pope
• B. Arnold
• C. Dr. Jhonson
• D. Ben Jonson

Explanation: Ben Jonson is credited with the dismissive remark that Spenser ‘writes no language’, reflecting Jonson’s criticism of Spenser’s archaic or…

• A. Critical faculty
• B. Modifying power
• C. A psychological experience
• D. A product of intellect

Explanation: For Coleridge, imagination is an active and shaping power that transforms and unifies experience, whereas fancy mainly rearranges existing…

• A. Wordsworth
• B. Coleridge
• C. Keats
• D. Charles Lamb

Explanation: Biographia Literaria is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s major work on poetry, imagination, and literary theory, published in 1817.

• A. Wordsworth
• B. Coleridge
• C. Southey
• D. Hazlitt

Explanation: Coleridge famously distinguished imagination from fancy in Biographia Literaria: imagination creatively unifies and transforms material…

• A. 2 sources
• B. 3 sources
• C. 4 sources
• D. 5 sources

Explanation: In On the Sublime, Longinus identifies five principal sources of sublimity, including grandeur of thought, strong emotion, noble diction…

• A. 1st Century BC
• B. 1st Century AD
• C. 2nd Century AD
• D. 3rd Century AD

Explanation: On the Sublime, traditionally attributed to Longinus, is generally dated to the 1st century AD, although its exact authorship and date…

• A. Tragic end of the tragedy
• B. Working of fate against the hero
• C. A weak trait in the character of the hero
• D. A strong quality in the character of the hero

Explanation: Hamartia means the error or flaw in judgment that contributes to a tragic hero's downfall, and it is conventionally described as a…

• A. Agathon
• B. Aeschylus
• C. Sophocles
• D. Euripides

Explanation: Aristotle called Euripides the most tragic of the Greek poets because his plays powerfully produce pity and fear, even when their…

• A. A term that describes how literature exposes its own artificiality
• B. An idea explored by Viktor Shklovsky
• C. A term that describes the capacity of art to counter the effects of habit
• D. All of the above answers are correct.

Explanation: Defamiliarization, a concept developed by Viktor Shklovsky, makes familiar things seem strange so that habitual perception is disrupted…

• A. The pathetic fallacy
• B. The intentional fallacy
• C. The affective fallacy
• D. The objective correlative

Explanation: The intentional fallacy is the error of judging a work by the author's stated or supposed intention rather than by the work itself.

• A. Discourse of English Poetry
• B. Discoveries
• C. Arte of English Poesie
• D. An Apologie for Poetrie

Explanation: Discoveries is Ben Jonson's collection of critical and literary observations, also known as Timber.