English

(Answers must be written in English)

Paper I

The required text is listed below. Adequate knowledge of the following topics and movements is also required:

The Renaissance: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama; Metaphysical Poetry; The Epic and the Mock-epic; Neo-classicism; Satire; The Romantic Movement; The Rise of the Novel; The Victorian Age.

Section A

• William Shakespeare:
  • King Lear
  • The Tempest
• John Donne:
  • Canonization
  • Death be not proud
  • The Good Morrow
  • On his Mistress going to bed
  • The Relic
• John Milton: Paradise Lost, I, II, IV, IX
• Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
• William Wordsworth:
  • Ode on Intimations of Immortality
  • Tintern Abbey
  • Three years she grew
  • She dwelt among untrodden ways
  • Michael
  • Resolution and Independence
  • The World is too much with us
  • Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
  • Upon Westminster Bridge.
• Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam
• Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House
• Section B
• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
• Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
• Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
• Charles Dickens: Hard Times
• George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss
• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles
• Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Paper II

The required text is listed below. Adequate knowledge of the following topics and movements is also required:

Modernism; Poets of the Thirties; The stream-of-consciousness Novel; Absurd Drama; Colonialism and Post-Colonialism; Indian Writing in English; Marxist, Psychoanalytical and Feminist approaches to literature; Post-Modernism.

Section A

• William Butler Yeats:
  • Easter 1916
  • The Second Coming
  • A Prayer for my daughter.
  • Sailing to Byzantium.
  • The Tower.
  • Among School Children.
  • Leda and the Swan.
  • Meru
  • Lapis Lazuli
  • The Second Coming
  • Byzantium.
  • T.S. Eliot:
  • The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
  • Journey of the Magi.
  • Burnt Norton.
• W.H. Auden:
  • Partition
  • Musee des Beaux Arts
  • in Memory of W.B. Yeats
  • Lay your sleeping head, my love
  • The Unknown Citizen
  • Consider
  • Mundus Et Infans
  • The Shield of Achilles
  • September 1, 1939
  • Petition.
• John Osborne: Look Back in Anger
• Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
• Philip Larkin:
  • Next
  • Please
  • Deceptions
  • Afternoons
  • Days
  • Mr. Bleaney
• A.K. Ramanujan:
  • Looking for a Causim on a Swing
  • A River
  • Of Mothers, among other Things
  • Love Poem for a Wife 1
  • Samll-Scale Reflections on a Great House
  • Obituary

NOTE: All these poems are available in the anthology Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, edited by R. Parthasarthy, published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi).

Section B

• Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim
• James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
• E.M. Forster: A Passage to India
• Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
• Raja Rao: Kanthapura
• V.S. Naipal: A House for Mr. Biswas