Ph.D. (English) Entrance Examination – Comprehensive Bullet-Point Notes

UNIT I – BRITISH LITERATURE

Period-overview
  • Spans from Middle-English (14ᵗʰ c.) to mid-20ᵗʰ-century modernism & post-war theatre.
  • Trace thematic shifts: courtly & religious medieval verse ➔ Renaissance humanism ➔ Augustan reason & satire ➔ Romantic individualism ➔ Victorian faith/doubt ➔ Modernist fragmentation & Post-war social realism.
  • Use timeline to relate authors chronologically: 1350!–!14001350!\text{–}!1400 (Chaucer) → 1550!–!16201550!\text{–}!1620 (Elizabethans) → Augustans 1660!–!17451660!\text{–}!1745 → Romantics 1790!–!18301790!\text{–}!1830 → Victorians 1830!–!19001830!\text{–}!1900 → Moderns 1900–19601900–1960.
Geoffrey Chaucer

• “Father of English poetry”; pioneered iambic pentameter & estate satire.
• Prologue to The Canterbury Tales → vivid cross-section of medieval society; estates satire; frame narrative.
• Troilus and Criseyde → courtly love + Boethian philosophy; narrative experimentation.
• Significance: blends French, Italian influences; legitimises Middle English for high literature.

Edmund Spenser

• Renaissance court poet; consciously fashions himself the “new Virgil”.
• Prothalamion & Epithalamion → ceremonial odes; mythological allusions; use of Spenserian stanza.
• The Faerie Queene → epic allegory of virtue; Protestant nationalism; archaic diction.

Francis Bacon

• Prose innovator; father of English essay; proponent of scientific induction.
• “Of Studies”, “Of Marriage” → aphoristic style; balance of civil pragmatism & moral reflection.

Christopher Marlowe

• University Wits; introduces blank verse to stage.
• Doctor Faustus → Renaissance over-reacher motif, Calvinist damnation debate.
• The Jew of Malta → Machiavellian protagonist; religious hypocrisy satire.

William Shakespeare

• Dramatist of human complexity; coined ~17001700 words.
• As You Like It → pastoral comedy; “All the world’s a stage”.
• Macbeth → regicide, fate vs. free will, equivocation; tragic architecture.
• King John → history play; legitimacy politics.

John Donne (Metaphysical)

• Invents “metaphysical conceit”; dramatic immediacy.
• A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning → compass conceit; spiritualised love.
• Death Be Not Proud → Holy Sonnet; neo-Platonic immortality.

John Milton

• Puritan epicist; Latinate syntactic inversion.
• Paradise Lost Bk IX → Fall narrative; heroic subject subverted; free will.
• Lycidas → pastoral elegy; crisis of faith; digressive form.

Samuel Johnson

• Neo-classical arbiter; lexicographer.
• Preface to Shakespeare → defence of Shakespeare’s timelessness; unity of character over plot.
• The Prince of Abissinia (Rasselas) → “choice of life” philosophy; oriental tale as moral satire.

Alexander Pope

• Heroic couplet mastery; Augustan wit, order.
• The Rape of the Lock → mock-epic; social triviality satirised.
• An Essay on Criticism → critical maxims; “To err is human”.

Oliver Goldsmith

• Transitional sentimentalist.
• The Vicar of Wakefield → domestic novel; naive narrator technique.
• The Deserted Village → elegy on rural depopulation; Augustan couplets.

William Wordsworth

• “High” Romantics; poetry of common life, imagination.
• “Tintern Abbey”, “Nutting” → spots of time; nature as moral guide.

S. T. Coleridge

• Supernatural + psychological realism.
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner → frame narrative; crime, guilt, redemption.
• Christabel & Kubla Khan → fragment poems; conversation & dream imagery.

P. B. Shelley

• Radical idealism; lyric intensity.
• “Ode to the West Wind” → revolutionary wind / poetic inspiration.
• “England in 1819” → sonnet of political protest.

John Keats

• Sensuous imagery; negative capability.
• “Ode on a Grecian Urn” → art vs. life, eternal beauty.
• Endymion → epic romance; “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever…”.

Charles Lamb

• Familiar essay; nostalgic London evocation.
• “Dream Children: A Reverie” & Essays of Elia → persona “Elia”; whimsical reflections.

Robert Browning

• Dramatic monologue innovator.
• “Andrea del Sarto” → failed perfectionist artist.
• Men and Women cycle; The Ring and the Book → murder trial polyphony.

Matthew Arnold

• Victorian cultural critic.
• “Dover Beach” → crisis of faith; ebbing “Sea of Faith”.
• “The Scholar-Gipsy” → pastoral myth of spiritual quest.

Alfred Tennyson

• Official voice of mid-Victorian age.
• “Ulysses” → dramatic monologue of restless heroism.
• “Locksley Hall” → triumph of progress vs. personal loss.

Charles Dickens

• Social realist novelist; serialized publication.
• Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities → critiques of industrialism, class mobility, French Revolution respectively.

Thomas Hardy

• Wessex novels; tragic determinism; Darwinian pessimism.
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles → “pure woman faithfully presented”.
• A Pair of Blue Eyes → cliff scene; ironic fate.

W. B. Yeats

• Symbolist modernism; Irish nationalism; gyres.
• “Sailing to Byzantium” → artifice of eternity.
• “Easter 1916”, “The Second Coming” → historical violence, apocalypse.

T. S. Eliot

• High modernist fragmentation; mythic method.
• The Waste Land → five-part collage; fertility myth.
• Murder in the Cathedral → verse drama; martyrdom of Thomas à Becket.

George Bernard Shaw

• Fabian socialist dramatist.
• Arms and the Man → anti-romantic war satire; “chocolate-cream soldier”.
• Love Among the Artists → early novel; attacks Philistinism.

D. H. Lawrence

• Psychological realism, sexuality & nature.
• Sons and Lovers → Oedipal conflicts; mining community.
• The Rainbow → generational saga; quest for wholeness.

John Osborne

• “Angry Young Man” movement.
• Look Back in Anger → post-war disillusionment; kitchen-sink realism.
• The Entertainer → decay of music-hall = decline of Britain.

UNIT II – FUNDAMENTALS OF LITERARY CRITICISM

Aristotle – The Poetics
  • Mimesis, catharsis, six elements of tragedy, unity of action.
  • Defines hamartia\textit{hamartia}, anagnorisis, peripeteia.
Longinus – On the Sublime
  • Sources of sublimity: grandeur of thought, strong emotion, figures, diction, composition.
  • Aesthetic transport → ecstasy of the audience.
Sir Philip Sidney – An Apology for Poetry
  • Defence against Puritan attacks (Gosson).
  • Poetry as teacher of virtue: “delight and teach”.
John Dryden – Essay of Dramatick Poesy
  • Four interlocutors debate ancients vs. moderns, English vs. French drama.
  • Favourable to Shakespeare; endorses mixed modes.
Dr. Samuel Johnson – Preface to Shakespeare
  • Universal passions, disregard for unities justified.
  • Concept of moral purpose + pleasurable instruction.
William Wordsworth – Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)
  • Definition of poetry as “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…”.
  • Use of “language really spoken by men”.
S. T. Coleridge – Biographia Literaria
  • Imagination: primary vs. secondary; criticism of mechanistic associationism.
  • Organic form vs. mechanical form.
Matthew Arnold – The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
  • “Disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought”.
  • Touchstone method.
T. S. Eliot – Tradition and the Individual Talent
  • Impersonality theory; poet’s mind as catalyst.
  • Historical sense = simultaneous order.

UNIT III – LITERARY TERMS

Selected Poetic Terms

• Bathos – sudden lapse into triviality; anti-climactic.
• Blank Verse – unrhymed iambic pentameter; e.g., Milton & Shakespeare.
• Carpe Diem – “seize the day” motif (Herrick’s “To the Virgins…”).
• Heroic Couplet – rhymed aaaa pentameter couplet (Pope).
• Epic – extended narrative of national hero (Beowulf, Paradise Lost).
• Imagery – sensory language clusters; visual, auditory etc.
• Mock Epic – trivial subject in epic form (Pope’s Rape of the Lock).
• Ode: Horatian (calm, uniform stanzas) vs. Pindaric (irregular triadic).
• Pastoral Elegy – mourning in idealised rural setting (Milton’s Lycidas).
• Refrain – repeated line/phrase.
• Rhyme – matching terminal sounds; masculine, feminine, slant etc.
• Satire – ridicule to reform; Horatian vs. Juvenalian.
• Symbol – concrete that suggests abstract (Yeats’ gyres).
• Caesura – metrical pause within line.
• Conceit – extended ingenious metaphor (metaphysical compass).

Fiction Terms (sampling)

• Bildungsroman – novel of psychological growth (Jane Eyre).
• Stream-of-Consciousness – interior monologue (Joyce).
• Point of View – first-, third-person limited/omniscient.
(Include others from syllabus list: epistolary, picaresque, plot, theme, setting, foil …)

Drama Terms (sampling)

• Anagnorisis – moment of recognition (Oedipus).
• Hamartia – tragic error.
• Hubris – excessive pride.
• Three Unities – time, place, action (Neo-classical ideal).
• Catharsis – purgation of pity & fear.
(Include aside, soliloquy, denouement, comic relief, chorus, climax, catastrophe, antagonist, conflict.)

UNIT VI – LITERARY CRITICISM & CONTEMPORARY THEORY

  1. Reader-Response
    • Roland Barthes – “The Death of the Author”; text = tissue of quotations; reader births meaning.
  2. Structuralism
    • Roman Jakobson – “Linguistics and Poetics”; communication model; poetic function emphasises “message for its own sake”.
  3. Post-structuralism / Deconstruction
    • Jacques Derrida – “Structure, Sign and Play…”; decentering; free play of signifiers; critique of logocentrism.
  4. Psychoanalytic Criticism
    • Lionel Trilling – “Freud and Literature”; Oedipus complex in Hamlet; creative process as neurosis.
  5. Marxist Criticism
    • Georg Lukács – “The Ideology of Modernism”; realism vs. modernist alienation; reflection theory.
  6. Postcolonial Theory
    • Edward Said – “Crisis [in Orientalism]”; West’s textual construction of the East; power/knowledge nexus.

UNIT V (OPTIONAL)

Note: Examinee attempts one sub-unit.

(A) AMERICAN LITERATURE

• Walt Whitman – “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”: elegy for Lincoln; catalogues; lilac-star-thrush symbols.
• Emily Dickinson – “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”: personified carriage ride; slant rhyme.
• Robert Frost – “Birches”, A Boy’s Will: rural New England; dramatic monologue disguised as nature lyric.
• Sylvia Plath – “Mirror”, Crossing the Water: confessional intensity; object-voice.
• E. E. Cummings – “Buffalo Bill’s Defunct”: typography, syntactic play.
• Langston Hughes – “Black Panther”, Tambourines to Glory: Harlem Renaissance rhythms; blues.
• R. W. Emerson – “The American Scholar”: intellectual independence; Transcendentalist self-reliance.
• Henry D. Thoreau – “Civil Disobedience”: moral law vs. state; passive resistance.
• Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie: memory play; symbolism of fragile glass.
• Eugene O’Neill – The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms: expressionist stagecraft; alienation.
• Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: vernacular realism; satire on slavery.
• Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea: iceberg style; code hero.
• Alice Walker – The Color Purple: epistolary; intersectional feminism; dialect voice.

(B) INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

• Toru Dutt – “Our Casuarina Tree”: nostalgia, cultural hybridity.
• Sri Aurobindo – “The Tiger and the Deer”, The Life Divine: integral yoga & evolutionary spirituality.
• Rabindranath Tagore – Gitanjali: mystic devotional lyrics; Nobel 19131913.
• Sarojini Naidu – “The Queen’s Rival”, The Golden Threshold: lyricism, patriotism.
• Nissim Ezekiel – “Poet, Lover, Bird Watcher”, Time to Change: modernist urban irony.
• A. K. Ramanujan – “Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House”: memory palimpsest; hybridity.
• Kamala Das – “My Grandmother’s House”: confessional; quest for love.
• R. Parthasarathy – “River, Once”: alienation, linguistic exile.
• Jayanta Mahapatra – “Hunger”: stark realism; poverty & exploitation.
• R. K. Narayan – The English Teacher: Malgudi realism; personal loss.
• Mulk Raj Anand – Coolie: caste oppression; social realism.
• Jawaharlal Nehru – Discovery of India (ch.2-3): syncretic civilisation history.
• Nirad C. Chaudhuri – Autobiography of an Unknown Indian: colonial ambivalence.
• A. P. J. Abdul Kalam – Wings of Fire: inspirational autobiography; technoscientific nationhood.
• Girish Karnad – Tughlaq, Hayavadana (context): myth + politics.
• Mahesh Dattani – Final Solutions: communalism; multi-voice staging.
• Anita Desai – Cry, the Peacock: stream-of-consciousness; psychic unraveling.
• Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things: nonlinear narrative; caste/gender critique.
• Bharati Mukherjee – Jasmine: immigrant identity metamorphosis.
• Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children: magical realism; allegory of nation.

(C) COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE

• A. D. Hope – “Australia”: ironic national portrait.
• Derek Walcott (misspelt in text) – “Ruins of a Great House”: colonial decay; hybrid identity.
• Judith Wright – “Clock and Heart”: ecological consciousness.
• Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient (context) / “The Cinnamon Peeler”: body & memory.
• Gabriel Okara – “Once Upon a Time”: father-son didacticism; loss of authenticity.
• Katherine Mansfield – Bliss & Other Stories: modernist interiority.
• Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart: Igbo culture; colonial disruption.
• Margaret Atwood – Surfacing: eco-feminism; unreliable narrator.
• Patrick White – Voss: existential exploration of Australian outback.
• V. S. Naipaul – A House for Mr. Biswas: diasporic identity; satire.
• Wole Soyinka – The Lion and the Jewel: Yoruba tradition vs. modernity; comic drama.

EXAM TIPS & CROSS-CONNECTIONS

  • Match critics to concepts (e.g., Aristotle ↔ catharsis; Derrida ↔ differance).
  • Link literary terms to texts in syllabus for applied examples.
  • Chronological mapping aids essay organisation.
  • Compare colonial experience across Yeats, Achebe, Rushdie.
  • Theoretical unit often paired with close reading: be ready to deconstruct “The Waste Land” via Eliotic impersonality or Derridean play.

QUICK FORMULAE / STATISTICS

  • Year of First Folio 16231623; Shakespeare.
  • Pope’s heroic couplet schema: pentameter+aa bb cc\text{pentameter} + aa\,bb\,cc rhyme.
  • Barthes’ communication chain: Author→Text→Reader\text{Author} \rightarrow \text{Text} \rightarrow \text{Reader} (authorial link severed).