GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Other Critical Lenses
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
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Example Questions
Example Question #1 : Feminist Criticism
The premise that women need space of their own to write originated in an essay by which British author?
Gertrude Stein
Mina Loy
Virginia Woolf
Angela Carter
Djuna Barnes
Virginia Woolf
This premise is the central tenet of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. The extended essay examines the idea that women need not only a literal room of their own for escaping the domestic roles assigned to them but also a figurative space in the traditionally male-dominated literary canon. Although the work uses a fictional narrator to make its points, it was first presented by Woolf as a series of lectures at Cambridge University.
Example Question #1 : Other Critical Lenses
Passage adapted from Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare (1756)," 9-63, in Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Selected and Set Forth with an Introduction by Walter Raleigh (London: Oxford University Press, 1969): 29.
"Whether Shakespeare knew the unities, and rejected them by design, or deviated from them by happy ignorance, it is, I think, impossible to decide, and useless to enquire. We may reasonably suppose, that, when he rose to notice, he did not want the counsels and admonitions of scholars and criticks, and that he at last deliberately persisted in a practice, which he might have begun by chance."
Which of the following is NOT one of the "unities" alluded to in the above excerpt?
Unity of Time
Unity of Place
Unity of Language
Unity of Action
Unity of Language
The three Classical Unities (also known as Aristotelian Unities) that formed the basis of much 17th and 18th century dramatic and literary criticism were: Unity of Time, Unity of Place, and Unity of Action.
Passage adapted from Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare (1756)," 9-63, in Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Selected and Set Forth with an Introduction by Walter Raleigh (London: Oxford University Press, 1969): 29.
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