GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Contexts of American Prose After 1925
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
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Example Questions
Example Question #71 : Contexts Of Prose
There was a contention as far as a suit (in which, piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell, that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?
The larger prose piece from which this passage was taken provided the title for a novel by which of the following authors?
Ernest Hemingway
Henry James
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Robert Penn Warren
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
The line "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" appears later in this sermon and provided the title for Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Adapted from "Meditation XVII" in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in My Sicknes by John Donne (1624)
Example Question #1 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
The author of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, this Southern writer was an invalid for much of her life.
Eudora Welty
Dorothy Allison
Carson McCullers
Zora Neale Hurston
Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor
This is Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Gothic writer who suffered from lupus and is perhaps best known for short stories such as “Good Country People,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and “Parker’s Back.” Her works are deeply invested in moral and ethical questions and in probing psychological examinations of her often poor, uneducated Southern characters.
Example Question #2 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
Which of the following novels is not set during a war?
Gravity’s Rainbow
For Whom the Bell Tolls
As I Lay Dying
A Farewell To Arms
Catch-22
As I Lay Dying
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is set during World War II, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is set during the end of World War II, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are set during World War I and the Spanish Civil War, respectively. Only Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is set during peacetime.
Example Question #3 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
Which American writer is famous for a novel depicting the migration and struggles of the Okies during the Dust Bowl?
Junot Díaz
John Steinbeck
John Dos Passos
Jack Kerouac
Cormac McCarthy
John Steinbeck
This is John Steinbeck, and the novel in question is the 1939 Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Grapes of Wrath. It is set during the Great Depression and centers on a family of indigent tenant farmers who move from Oklahoma to California.
Example Question #4 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
Which of these writers is known for his dark, brooding western novels and polysyndetic sentence style?
Junot Díaz
Cormac McCarthy
John Steinbeck
James Baldwin
Vladimir Nabokov
Cormac McCarthy
This is Cormac McCarthy, whose novels include All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country For Old Men. His work often features apocalyptic settings, largely male casts, and dialogues of untranslated Spanish.
Example Question #5 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
This Dominican novelist won the 2008 Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Edwidge Danticat
Junot Díaz
Laura Esquivel
Sandra Cisneros
Roberto Bolaño
Junot Díaz
The writer in question is Junot Díaz. His other works include story collections titled Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, and much of his short fiction revolves around Dominican-American immigrants.
Example Question #6 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
A classic American novel by this author depicts the glittering, empty lives of flappers and their ilk in the Hamptons of the early twentieth century.
Robert Penn Warren
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
John Dos Passos
D.H. Lawrence
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925.
Example Question #7 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
Which of the following authors is not a Southern Gothic writer?
Ernest Hemingway
Walker Percy
Flannery O’Connor
Carson McCullers
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway was an expatriate who wrote terse, emotionally complex novels set mainly in Europe. He is not an exemplar of the Southern Gothic style, which is known for its setting of the American South and its use of macabre and grotesque events (often to provide social commentary).
Example Question #8 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
This author set many of his novels in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. Who is he?
Cormac McCarthy
John Steinbeck
John Dos Passos
Jack Kerouac
William Faulkner
William Faulkner
This is William Faulkner. Yoknapatawpha comes from a Cherokee phrase and is based on real places in Mississippi, and many of his novels—such as Absalom! Absalom!, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury—are set here.
Example Question #9 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
This 1958 novel features a storyline about an adult man who becomes obsessed with and begins a sexual relationship with a preteen girl.
Of Mice and Men
Rabbit, Run
Lolita
All the King’s Men
White Noise
Lolita
This is Vladimir Nabokov’s highly controversial Lolita. Although the book was largely regarded as pornographic and received little critical acclaim when it was first published, it has since become one of the most highly regarded novels of the twentieth century.
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