100 Exciting English Literature MCQs

🏰 Section 1: Medieval & Chaucer (14th Century)

1. Geoffrey Chaucer is often called the “Father of English Poetry” because he:
A) Invented blank verse
B) Used the East Midland dialect
C) Wrote in Latin and French
D) Rejected rhyme entirely
Answer: B

2. Which unfinished Chaucer work is modeled on Boccaccio’s Teseida?
A) The Knight’s Tale
B) The House of Fame
C) Troilus and Criseyde
D) The Book of the Duchess
Answer: C

3. Who among Chaucer’s pilgrims tells a tale in prose?
A) The Pardoner
B) The Parson
C) The Wife of Bath
D) The Miller
Answer: B

4. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote” is an example of:
A) Heroic couplet
B) Rhyming tetrameter
C) Iambic pentameter
D) Accentual-alliterative verse
Answer: C

5. In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the cock Chauntecleer escapes the fox by:
A) Fighting bravely
B) Outwitting him with words
C) Flying away
D) Pretending to be dead
Answer: B

6. Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules is linked with which festival?
A) May Day
B) St. Valentine’s Day
C) Easter
D) Christmas
Answer: B

7. Which of the following influenced Chaucer least?
A) Dante
B) Virgil
C) Boccaccio
D) Ovid
Answer: B

8. The “fabliau” form in The Miller’s Tale is best described as:
A) Religious allegory
B) Comic and bawdy narrative
C) Political satire
D) Chivalric romance
Answer: B

9. Chaucer’s Retraction at the end of The Canterbury Tales expresses:
A) Pride in his work
B) Satire of religious hypocrisy
C) Repentance for frivolous writing
D) Anger at critics
Answer: C

10. Which contemporary of Chaucer also wrote in English?
A) William Langland
B) Sir Philip Sidney
C) Edmund Spenser
D) Thomas Wyatt
Answer: A

🎭 Section 2: The Elizabethans (Shakespeare & contemporaries)

11. Shakespeare’s first published work was:
A) Venus and Adonis
B) Romeo and Juliet
C) A Midsummer Night’s Dream
D) The Rape of Lucrece
Answer: A

12. Who is known as “the University Wits”?
A) Poets who studied at Oxford/Cambridge and wrote drama
B) Shakespeare’s troupe of actors
C) Courtly love poets
D) Religious reformers
Answer: A

13. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio is tricked by:
A) Olivia
B) Maria
C) Viola
D) Orsino
Answer: B

14. Which of the following is NOT a Shakespearean tragedy?
A) King Lear
B) Macbeth
C) Othello
D) The Alchemist
Answer: D

15. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is based on the theme of:
A) Religious martyrdom
B) The Faust legend of selling one’s soul
C) Chivalric romance
D) Satire of Puritanism
Answer: B

16. Who is called the “Morning Star of the Renaissance” in English literature?
A) Chaucer
B) Marlowe
C) Wyatt
D) Spenser
Answer: C

17. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is often interpreted as:
A) A comedy of manners
B) A pastoral elegy
C) A postcolonial allegory
D) A historical tragedy
Answer: C

18. Faerie Queene was written in honor of:
A) Queen Mary
B) Queen Elizabeth I
C) Queen Anne
D) Queen Victoria
Answer: B

19. The line “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?” refers to:
A) Juliet
B) Helen of Troy
C) Dido
D) Cleopatra
Answer: B

20. Which playwright satirized Puritans in Bartholomew Fair?
A) Ben Jonson
B) Thomas Kyd
C) John Webster
D) George Peele
Answer: A

✒️ Section 3: Metaphysical Poets & Milton (17th Century)

21. The phrase “A good poem is a piece of a man’s heart” is attributed to:
A) John Milton
B) John Donne
C) Andrew Marvell
D) George Herbert
Answer: B

22. John Donne’s poetry is often described as:
A) Pastoral
B) Metaphysical
C) Cavalier
D) Romantic
Answer: B

23. Which of the following is a metaphysical conceit?
A) Love compared to a rose
B) The beloved compared to the moon
C) Two lovers compared to the legs of a compass
D) A knight compared to a lion
Answer: C

24. Milton’s Paradise Lost was first published in:
A) 1611
B) 1667
C) 1674
D) 1688
Answer: B

25. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s famous line “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” is found in which Book?
A) I
B) II
C) III
D) IV
Answer: A

26. Which poem of Marvell reflects political tensions and praises Oliver Cromwell?
A) To His Coy Mistress
B) Upon Appleton House
C) The Garden
D) Horatian Ode
Answer: D

27. Which poet is associated with the “plain style” of religious poetry?
A) John Donne
B) George Herbert
C) Richard Crashaw
D) Henry Vaughan
Answer: B

28. Milton’s Areopagitica is a defense of:
A) Divine right of kings
B) Freedom of the press
C) Religious orthodoxy
D) Classical education
Answer: B

29. The line “Had we but world enough and time” begins which poem?
A) The Definition of Love
B) To His Coy Mistress
C) The Collar
D) Lycidas
Answer: B

30. Lycidas is best described as:
A) A pastoral elegy
B) A sonnet
C) A satire
D) A heroic couplet
Answer: A

🎩 Section 4: Restoration & 18th Century

31. The term “Restoration” in English literature refers to:
A) The return of monarchy under Charles II in 1660
B) The rebuilding after the Great Fire
C) The revival of drama in 1700
D) The translation of classics
Answer: A

32. Which of these is a Restoration comedy of manners?
A) She Stoops to Conquer
B) The Way of the World
C) The Rivals
D) School for Scandal
Answer: B

33. John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel is an example of:
A) Political allegory
B) Epic satire
C) Elegiac poetry
D) Heroic tragedy
Answer: A

34. Who wrote A Modest Proposal?
A) Jonathan Swift
B) Alexander Pope
C) Joseph Addison
D) Samuel Johnson
Answer: A

35. The Rape of the Lock is based on:
A) A mythological legend
B) A real-life quarrel between families
C) Court intrigue
D) Political rebellion
Answer: B

36. Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare argues that:
A) Shakespeare lacked learning
B) Shakespeare’s strength lies in universality
C) Shakespeare’s plays are unfit for the stage
D) Shakespeare was inferior to Jonson
Answer: B

37. Which literary period is often called the “Age of Reason”?
A) Elizabethan
B) Restoration
C) 18th Century (Neoclassical)
D) Romantic
Answer: C

38. Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer is subtitled:
A) A Sentimental Comedy
B) A Comedy of Manners
C) A Farce in Two Acts
D) The Mistakes of a Night
Answer: D

39. Addison and Steele are associated with which periodical?
A) The Examiner
B) The Tatler and The Spectator
C) The Rambler
D) The Review
Answer: B

40. Which of the following is a picaresque novel?
A) Robinson Crusoe
B) Tom Jones
C) Pamela
D) Clarissa
Answer: B

🌄 Section 5: The Romantics (41–50)

41. The Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge is considered the:
A) Beginning of Romanticism in England
B) End of Neoclassicism
C) First collection of sonnets
D) First blank-verse epic
Answer: A

42. Wordsworth defined poetry as:
A) “The best words in the best order”
B) “A spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
C) “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”
D) “Speaking truth in pleasing words”
Answer: B

43. Which poem contains the phrase “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused”?
A) Ode on a Grecian Urn
B) Tintern Abbey
C) Kubla Khan
D) The Prelude
Answer: B

44. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan is often described as:
A) A complete allegory
B) A dream fragment
C) A satirical parody
D) A political poem
Answer: B

45. The line “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” is from:
A) Byron’s Childe Harold
B) Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality
C) Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind
D) Keats’s To Autumn
Answer: C

46. Byron’s narrative poem about a melancholy hero who rejects society is:
A) The Giaour
B) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
C) Don Juan
D) Lara
Answer: B

47. Keats’s theory of “Negative Capability” means:
A) A poet must deny his own emotions
B) A poet should remain in uncertainties without forcing resolution
C) A poet must rely on imagination instead of reason
D) A poet must balance beauty and truth
Answer: B

48. Which Romantic poet drowned at a young age?
A) Wordsworth
B) Coleridge
C) Shelley
D) Keats
Answer: C

49. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” is the opening line of:
A) Lamia
B) Endymion
C) Hyperion
D) Ode on Melancholy
Answer: B

50. Which Romantic was known as “the most un-Romantic of the Romantics” for his interest in realism?
A) Wordsworth
B) Byron
C) Coleridge
D) Keats
Answer: A

🕰️ Section 6: The Victorians (51–60)

51. Which Victorian poet wrote In Memoriam A.H.H.?
A) Robert Browning
B) Matthew Arnold
C) Alfred Tennyson
D) Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Answer: C

52. The lady of Shalott is a retelling of:
A) Arthurian legend
B) Biblical story
C) Greek myth
D) A medieval romance from Chaucer
Answer: A

53. Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess is an example of:
A) Dramatic monologue
B) Elegy
C) Ode
D) Ballad
Answer: A

54. The line “Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness” echoes which theme in Victorian poetry?
A) Pessimism
B) Faith vs. doubt
C) Crisis of religion
D) Return to Romantic transcendence
Answer: D

55. Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach laments:
A) The loss of love
B) The decline of faith in the modern world
C) The failure of democracy
D) The vanity of wealth
Answer: B

56. Which novel by Charles Dickens begins with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?
A) Oliver Twist
B) Great Expectations
C) David Copperfield
D) A Tale of Two Cities
Answer: D

57. Thomas Hardy’s fiction is often described as:
A) Romantic optimism
B) Naturalistic pessimism
C) Gothic sensationalism
D) Historical realism
Answer: B

58. Which Victorian novelist created the character Dorothea Brooke?
A) Charles Dickens
B) George Eliot
C) Anthony Trollope
D) Elizabeth Gaskell
Answer: B

59. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sought inspiration from:
A) The Renaissance masters
B) Medieval art and simplicity
C) Greek classical forms
D) Victorian industrial life
Answer: B

60. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetic style is best known for:
A) Heroic couplets
B) Sprung rhythm
C) Free verse
D) Blank verse
Answer: B

🌍 Section 7: Modernism (61–70)

61. Which 1922 novel is considered the landmark of high modernism?
A) Mrs Dalloway
B) A Passage to India
C) Ulysses
D) The Waste Land
Answer: C

62. The epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is taken from:
A) Dante’s Inferno
B) Petronius’ Satyricon
C) Homer’s Odyssey
D) Virgil’s Aeneid
Answer: B

63. Virginia Woolf’s concept of “stream of consciousness” is best illustrated in:
A) Orlando
B) To the Lighthouse
C) The Waves
D) Mrs Dalloway
Answer: D

64. W. B. Yeats’s line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” appears in which poem?
A) Easter 1916
B) The Tower
C) The Second Coming
D) Sailing to Byzantium
Answer: C

65. Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum “Make it new” emphasizes:
A) Romantic revival
B) Literary innovation and experimentation
C) Political propaganda
D) Historical imitation
Answer: B

66. Which novel begins with the line “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”?
A) Jane Eyre
B) Women in Love
C) Sons and Lovers
D) A Room with a View
Answer: A

67. D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is often read as:
A) A critique of modern industrialism
B) A study of Oedipal psychology
C) A rural idyll
D) A political allegory
Answer: B

68. Which poet was part of the “Imagist” movement?
A) W. H. Auden
B) Ezra Pound
C) Dylan Thomas
D) Philip Larkin
Answer: B

69. T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent argues that:
A) Poetry is spontaneous emotion
B) Poetry requires impersonality
C) Poets must serve political purposes
D) Imagination surpasses tradition
Answer: B

70. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is famous for its:
A) Use of simple English prose
B) Multilingual wordplay and dream language
C) Straightforward narrative style
D) Historical satire
Answer: B

💣 Section 8: Post-War Literature (71–80)

71. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is often classified as:
A) Absurdist drama
B) Expressionist drama
C) Realist drama
D) Historical allegory
Answer: A

72. The phrase “Angry Young Men” refers to:
A) Post-WWI poets
B) 1950s British novelists/playwrights expressing disillusionment
C) Vietnam War writers
D) Postcolonial authors
Answer: B

73. Which playwright wrote Look Back in Anger?
A) Harold Pinter
B) John Osborne
C) Tom Stoppard
D) Peter Shaffer
Answer: B

74. The term “The Movement” in 1950s poetry is associated with:
A) Dylan Thomas and surrealism
B) Philip Larkin and restrained realism
C) W. H. Auden and political poetry
D) Ted Hughes and myth-making
Answer: B

75. Graham Greene often described his novels as:
A) Romantic tales
B) Catholic novels or entertainments
C) Absurdist satires
D) Realist epics
Answer: B

76. In Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the conch shell symbolizes:
A) Civilization and order
B) Violence and power
C) Death and decay
D) Innocence and purity
Answer: A

77. Which poem by Dylan Thomas begins “Do not go gentle into that good night”?
A) Fern Hill
B) Death Shall Have No Dominion
C) A Refusal to Mourn
D) Villanelle on His Father’s Death
Answer: D

78. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar deals with:
A) Postcolonial identity
B) Feminist critique of patriarchy and mental illness
C) Satire on industrial society
D) Political corruption
Answer: B

79. Which British dramatist introduced the concept of “Comedy of Menace”?
A) Harold Pinter
B) John Osborne
C) Caryl Churchill
D) Edward Bond
Answer: A

80. The phrase “Things fall apart” was used by Chinua Achebe for his novel, originally borrowed from:
A) T. S. Eliot
B) W. B. Yeats
C) James Joyce
D) Derek Walcott
Answer: B

🌏 Section 9: Postcolonial & Global Voices (81–90)

81. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is set in which country?
A) Ghana
B) Nigeria
C) Kenya
D) South Africa
Answer: B

82. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind advocates:
A) Writing in English for global reach
B) Rejecting literature altogether
C) Writing in indigenous African languages
D) Abandoning fiction for politics
Answer: C

83. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is structured around:
A) Partition of India
B) Emergency of 1975
C) Independence of India at midnight, 1947
D) The Indo-China war
Answer: C

84. Which Caribbean poet-playwright wrote Dream on Monkey Mountain?
A) Kamau Brathwaite
B) Derek Walcott
C) V. S. Naipaul
D) Claude McKay
Answer: B

85. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is set in:
A) Kerala
B) Bengal
C) Sri Lanka
D) Delhi
Answer: A

86. The concept of Subaltern in postcolonial studies is associated with:
A) Edward Said
B) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
C) Homi Bhabha
D) Frantz Fanon
Answer: B

87. V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas is primarily about:
A) Indian indentured labor in Trinidad
B) British colonial wars
C) African tribal rituals
D) Post-apartheid South Africa
Answer: A

88. Who wrote the novel Nervous Conditions, one of the first by a black Zimbabwean woman?
A) Ama Ata Aidoo
B) Tsitsi Dangarembga
C) Nadine Gordimer
D) Buchi Emecheta
Answer: B

89. “Hybridity,” “Mimicry,” and “Third Space” are concepts coined by:
A) Edward Said
B) Homi K. Bhabha
C) Stuart Hall
D) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Answer: B

90. Toni Morrison’s Beloved centers on:
A) The trauma of slavery in America
B) The Harlem Renaissance
C) Civil rights protests
D) African mythology
Answer: A

📚 Section 10: Contemporary & Literary Criticism (91–100)

91. Roland Barthes declared the “Death of the Author” to emphasize:
A) Readers’ active role in meaning-making
B) The superiority of writers over readers
C) The importance of historical biography
D) The literal death of modern writers
Answer: A

92. Jacques Derrida is the founder of:
A) Marxist criticism
B) Deconstruction
C) New Criticism
D) Psychoanalytic criticism
Answer: B

93. “Discipline and Punish” is a key work by:
A) Foucault
B) Derrida
C) Lacan
D) Althusser
Answer: A

94. Which critic is associated with “The Mirror Stage” in psychoanalysis?
A) Sigmund Freud
B) Jacques Lacan
C) Julia Kristeva
D) Harold Bloom
Answer: B

95. Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism outlines:
A) Archetypal criticism
B) Marxist criticism
C) Reader-response criticism
D) Postcolonial criticism
Answer: A

96. Which literary theory argues that meaning depends on differences in language, not fixed essence?
A) Structuralism
B) Post-structuralism
C) New Historicism
D) Feminism
Answer: B

97. Edward Said’s Orientalism critiques:
A) Western stereotypes about the East
B) Colonial exploitation of Africa
C) Victorian morality
D) Global capitalism
Answer: A

98. Feminist critic Elaine Showalter proposed:
A) Gynocriticism – a study of women as writers
B) The unconscious in literature
C) Reader-response criticism
D) Deconstruction
Answer: A

99. Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence explores:
A) How writers rebel against their literary precursors
B) Readerly anxieties in interpretation
C) Political influence on literature
D) Religious control of art
Answer: A

100. Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay is titled:
A) Can the Subaltern Speak?
B) A Room of One’s Own
C) Against Interpretation
D) The Uses of Literacy
Answer: A