ENGLISH COURSE OF LITERATURE: 5TH YEAR.
QUESTIONS ON ALL THE “PROGRAMMA”
1. Which are the main romantic elements common to all English romantic poets?
2. According to the English romantic poets, poetry was not possible without imagination.
Explain this statement.
3. Nature: its use and meaning in the poetry of William Wordsworth.
4. Pierce B. Shelley: the role of the poet.
5. Childhood as a romantic theme. Focus on William Blake and William Wordsworth to
outline the poets’ development and exploitation of such theme in their poetry.
6. The romantic poet saw himself as no ordinary man. Explain this statement.
7. In Biographia Literaria, writing about the genesis of the Lyrical Ballads, S.T.Coleridge said
his task in writing poems would be to talk about supernatural things in such a way as to
make them seem real. How does The Rime of the Ancient Mariner reflect this?
8. Lord George Gordon Byron was considered to be the archetypical Romantic poet to the
extent that the adjective “Byronic” is now part of the English language. What does this
adjective describe?
9. What is the “negative capability” of a poet, according to Keats?
10. Why can John Keats be considered a forerunner to the British Aesthetic Movement of the
Late Victorian period?
11. Why can’t Jane Austen be considered a romantic author?
12. What are the main characteristics of the “novel of manners” as they can be depicted in Pride
and Prejudice?And what are the main themes of the novel?
13. What were the main features of Victorian society?
14. The Victorian novel: its main characteristics and most relevant exponents.
15. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, report about its main themes and features.
16. Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, report about its main themes and features.
17. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles, report about its main themes and features.
18. Oscar Wilde’s The picture of Dorian Gray: report about its main themes and features.
19. In the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde says that “all art is quite useless”.
Explain the meaning of this statement with reference to Wilde's aesthetic ideas.
20. What were the main principles of the Aesthetic movement?
21. Which aspects of Victorian society does Wilde implicitly criticise in The Importance of
being Earnest?
22. Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde: three different moral perspectives on the
Victorian Age. Explain them with reference to the texts read.
23. What influence did Freud have on 20th century writers?
24. What are some of the influences Bergson's theories had on Modernist writers?
25. What is “stream of consciousness” fiction and who were its greatest practitioners in
English? What techniques did they use?
26. Explain the possible meanings of the title of Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness.
27. Discuss Joyce's relationship with Dublin and how the feeling of “paralysis” he associates
with his hometown is developed in Dubliners.
28. Referring to a passage you have read form Dubliners, explain and discuss Joyce's idea of
“epiphany”.
29. Mrs Dalloway: its modernist characteristics.
30. Lord of the Flies by Golding: its structure and point of view adopted, the setting, the most
important characters, the themes developed, the symbolism.
31. In what sense is Nineteen Eighty-Four an anti-utopian novel?
32. [How does Eliot describe the crisis of the modern man? (Refer to the complexity of his
poetry, to the “objective correlative”, to the main themes of his greatest work “The Waste
Land”)]