List of top English Literature Questions asked in GATE XH-C2

“The feminist insistence that ‘the personal is political’ has had profound effects on other genres. Feminist academics in several disciplines now insist that the subjective element must not be left out of the practice of research methods, such as the interview, or of theories of knowledge production (Skeggs 1995; Maynard and Purvis 1994; Reinhartz 1992).”
From the passage above, which of the following can be correctly concluded?

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings featuring Sherlock Holmes, as is the case with much of 19th century British fiction, colonialism appears as objects, events, animals, places, fears and desires. Which of the following support/s this claim?

Prolepsis is the representation or assumption in the present, of a future act or development.
Which of the following is/are instance/s of prolepsis?

Which of the following is/are example/s of `metafiction`?

Which of the following is/are true about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of `minor literature’?

Choose one or more options from below.
In contrast to traditional Historicism, New Historicism ________

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” proposes which of the following?

Literary criticism considers which one of the following texts as offering the strongest support for mimetic theories of art?

Assertion P: Dalit narratives tend to be read single-dimensionally as evoking the reader’s pity at the protagonist’s caste humiliation, or as telling the story of heroic protest against discrimination, or as a description of the protagonist’s rise from misery to triumph.
Assertion Q: There is a tendency to keep the Other in the space of difference, as perpetually exotic.
In the context of the assertions above, which one of the following statements is true?

Read the following:
“[…] a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. […] the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
Which theoretical school does the excerpt best represent?

The following is a passage about O. V. Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak:
The novel is set in a remote village, in the middle of the 20th century. The narrative is replete with images of the vast ecosystem of the living and the non-living, a land potent with dreams and legends.
The analysis presented in this description is congruent with which one of the following concepts proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin?

An “implied reader” is a ________

Study the three examples below:
i) In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the interior ministry of the totalitarian state is called the ‘Ministry of Love’.
ii) In the genre of horror fiction, the reader knows that the killer is hiding in the closet, but the protagonist does not.
iii) “But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.” (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)
These are instances of _______

Which of the following use/s the device of a `story within a story' with multiple narrators?

Which of the following is an example/are examples of noir, popular both as fiction and film?

The following words in English are clustered according to their origin. Choose the cluster/s that contain/s words drawn from languages of the Indian subcontinent.

Which of the following novels is/are predominantly set in Bombay?

Which of the following critically rewrite/s canonical English novels?

The first institution to teach English Literature in the world is ________

Henry James’ essay “The Art of Fiction”, one of the earliest literary critical engagements with the form of the novel, was preceded by his book-length study of _______

“The name is H. Hatterr, and I am continuing . . . Biologically, I am fifty-five of the species.”
The lines above are from an early Indian English novelWho is the author of this novel?

Which of the following is NOT true of Bram Stoker’s Dracula?

What is common among Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Mahasweta Devi's Mother of 1084, Shobha Shakti's Gorilla, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun?