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Major Literary Movements — GK Questions with Answers

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20 questions
  1. The term "Existentialism" is most closely associated with its founder — (Previous year)
    1. Soren Kierkegaard
    2. Jean-Paul Sartre
    3. Martin Heidegger
    4. Friedrich Nietzsche
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    Answer: (A) Soren Kierkegaard

    Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialist thinking. Sartre later made it a public movement.

  2. The Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho was written by — (Previous year)
    1. Mary Shelley
    2. Ann Radcliffe
    3. Horace Walpole
    4. M. G. Lewis
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    Answer: (B) Ann Radcliffe

    Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) wrote it in 1794. Walpole wrote the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto.

  3. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English artists and writers belonging to the — (Previous year)
    1. Romantic Period
    2. Victorian Period
    3. Elizabethan Period
    4. Jacobean Period
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    Answer: (B) Victorian Period

    The Brotherhood was founded in 1848, inside the Victorian age.

  4. Who among the following was NOT associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Movement? (Previous year)
    1. W. B. Yeats
    2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
    3. Ford Madox Brown
    4. John Everett Millais
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    Answer: (A) W. B. Yeats

    Yeats belongs to a later generation, though he admired their work.

  5. The work of Simone de Beauvoir was heavily influenced by — (Previous year)
    1. Modernism
    2. Realism
    3. Existentialism
    4. Individualism
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    Answer: (C) Existentialism

    She was Sartre’s lifelong companion, and The Second Sex applies existentialist thinking to the position of women.

  6. Which movement is marked by darkly picturesque scenery and eerie stories of the macabre? (Previous year)
    1. Romanticism
    2. Existentialism
    3. Symbolism
    4. Gothic
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    Answer: (D) Gothic

    Ruined castles, gloom and the macabre are the marks of the Gothic.

  7. The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) is a work by — (Previous year)
    1. Paul Verlaine
    2. Arthur Symons
    3. Stephane Mallarme
    4. Arthur Rimbaud
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    Answer: (B) Arthur Symons

    Arthur Symons introduced French Symbolism to English readers, influencing T. S. Eliot.

  8. Which statement about the Symbolist Movement is correct? (Previous year)
    1. The technique of the French Symbolists had an immense influence in Europe, England and America.
    2. In eighteenth-century America, Ezra Pound was a prominent Symbolist.
    3. Literary historians believe the Symbolist Movement began with the Romantic writers in England.
    4. Dylan Thomas, Hart Crane and E. E. Cummings did not use symbols in their poetry.
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    Answer: (A) The technique of the French Symbolists had an immense influence in Europe, England and America.

    Symbolism was French and spread widely. Pound was a twentieth-century Imagist, and the other two statements are simply false.

  9. Ezra Pound’s maxim "Make it new" heralded which movement? (Previous year)
    1. Realism
    2. Symbolism
    3. Modernism
    4. Post-modernism
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    Answer: (C) Modernism

    It became the slogan of Modernism, through the Imagist movement Pound led.

  10. Which of these is NOT a feature of Romanticism?
    1. Love of wild nature
    2. Trust in imagination
    3. Obedience to classical rules
    4. Interest in the common man
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    Answer: (C) Obedience to classical rules

    Obedience to the rules of the ancients is the mark of the Neoclassical age, which Romanticism rebelled against.

  1. The first Gothic novel is —
    1. The Monk
    2. The Castle of Otranto
    3. Frankenstein
    4. Melmoth the Wanderer
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    Answer: (B) The Castle of Otranto

    Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) set the pattern for all the rest.

  2. Ann Radcliffe’s method, in which apparent terrors are finally given a natural cause, is called —
    1. The uncanny
    2. The explained supernatural
    3. The sublime
    4. The grotesque
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    Answer: (B) The explained supernatural

    She raises terror and then dissolves it — the explained supernatural.

  3. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in —
    1. 1798
    2. 1832
    3. 1848
    4. 1859
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    Answer: (C) 1848

    1848, by Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais.

  4. The Pre-Raphaelite magazine was called —
    1. The Spectator
    2. The Germ
    3. The Yellow Book
    4. The Rambler
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    Answer: (B) The Germ

    The Germ, published in 1850.

  5. Which writer was both a painter and a poet of the Pre-Raphaelite school?
    1. William Morris
    2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
    3. A. C. Swinburne
    4. Christina Rossetti
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    Answer: (B) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti worked in both arts, which is why the movement joins painting to poetry.

  6. Naturalism differs from realism because it holds that man is —
    1. free to choose his own path
    2. determined by heredity and environment
    3. essentially good by nature
    4. guided by divine providence
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    Answer: (B) determined by heredity and environment

    Naturalism treats a life as determined by forces outside the person’s control. Its leader is Zola.

  7. Who is regarded as the leader of naturalism?
    1. Gustave Flaubert
    2. Émile Zola
    3. Honoré de Balzac
    4. Leo Tolstoy
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    Answer: (B) Émile Zola

    Zola set out the naturalist programme and applied it across a whole novel cycle.

  8. "Existence precedes essence" means that —
    1. man is born with a fixed nature
    2. man creates himself through his choices
    3. the soul exists before the body
    4. essence is more important than existence
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    Answer: (B) man creates himself through his choices

    There is no human nature given in advance; a person becomes what he chooses to be.

  9. Which dramatist is central to the Theatre of the Absurd?
    1. Henrik Ibsen
    2. Samuel Beckett
    3. G. B. Shaw
    4. John Galsworthy
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    Answer: (B) Samuel Beckett

    Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is the central play of the movement. Ibsen and Shaw are realists.

  10. "Art for art’s sake" is the slogan of —
    1. Realism
    2. Aestheticism
    3. Imagism
    4. Naturalism
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    Answer: (B) Aestheticism

    Aestheticism holds that art needs no moral or social purpose — Pater and Wilde are its figures.

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