The author of the passage is John Donne, who served as the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London from 1621 until his death in 1631.  This sermon was Donne's most famous piece of prose and is one that you should definitely know for the test.

Adapted from "Meditation XVII" in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in My Sicknes by John Donne (1624)

British author Horace Walpole is widely considered the progenitor of the Gothic style, which is characterized by its mix of horror, romanticism, and macabre excess. Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto is usually described as the first work in this genre, although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” are all more widely known works of Gothic literature.

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 by Emily Brönte, concerns jealousy and a love triangle between the lower-class Heathcliff, the middle-class Catherine Earnshaw, and the wealthy Edgar Linton.

Published in 1922, Ulysses occurs on a single day in Dublin. The novel is highly experimental, relying heavily on allusion, stream-of-consciousness, and esoteric wordplay.

This is George Eliot, whose given name was Mary Anne Evans and who wrote nineteenth-century masterpieces such as Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Mill on the Floss. She is said to have used a pen name in part to protect her privacy and in part to ensure that her works would be taken seriously and not considered as representative of the light-hearted romances that women were assumed to write exclusively.

Published in 1891, The Picture of Dorian Gray investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. It does so through the story of a young man (Dorian Gray) who has a magical portrait painted of him (by Basil Hallward) that enables him to remain young and unblemished despite his increasingly repugnant and unethical actions. The novel’s emphasis on the utility of art and the artist and preoccupation with beautiful things make it most closely linked to aestheticism, which emphasizes form and style above all else.

Written by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels parodies the popular travelogues of eighteenth-century Europe. It was considered fashionable at the time to travel to an exotic land and then publish an account of the journey, but Swift’s satire transcends the genre by presenting a deeper investigation of human nature and social goods.

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe is the first novel written in English among these answer choices. While Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote precedes Robinson Crusoe by more than a hundred years, it originally was written in Spanish.

Clarissa is an epistolary novel, or a novel written in the form of a series of letters. The story centers on its eponymous heroine and her tragic attempts to break free from her family’s conniving and preserve her honor.

Frankenstein investigates insanity in its probing of Dr. Frankenstein’s mental state; it investigates both secrecy and the nature of knowledge in its portrayal of the guilt and fear Dr. Frankenstein feels when he discovers but does not disclose powerful new information; and it investigates aesthetics when it contrasts the beautiful (various female characters) with the hideous (the monster). Politics is the only theme that does not play a major role in the novel.