KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION
COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION FOR PROVINCIAL MANAGEMENT SERVICE 2010
ENGLISH LITERATURE PAPER I
Time Allowed: 03 Hours Max. Marks: 100
Note: Attempt any five questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1 The Romantic Movement was all about the “release of [pervasive intellectual] energy, experimental boldness creative power which marks a 1iterary renaissance.” Discuss with reference to the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats.
2 In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth “set himself in opposition to the literary ancien regime, those writers of the preceding century who, to his view had imposed on poetry artificial conventions which distorted its free and natural development.” Discuss Wordsworth’s critical manifesto of poetic principles.
3 “Keats was extraordinarily sensitive to the ambivalences of human experience — to the mingling, at their highest intensity, of pleasure and pain, to the destructiveness of love, and to the erotic quality of the longing for death.” Discuss Keats’ poems which convey these themes.
4 Charles Lamb’s essays display his own personality, and “many of his best familiar essays, like Wordsworth’s poems, are made up of his early experience and feelings, recollected in tranquility.” Discuss Lambs essays in the light of this Comment.
5 “If he live to be ninety, Dickens will still be creating new characters, in his art that man. marvelous.” (Thackeray). Discuss Dickens’ art of characterization in the light of this comment
6 Tennyson was “essentially a poet of the countryside, a man whose whole being was conditioned by the recurring rhythms of rural rather than urban life. He had the countryman’s awareness of traditional roots . ..” Discuss the ‘rhythms of rural life in Tennyson’s poetry.
7 “Men [and women, too] in Hardy’s fiction are not masters of their fates; they are at the mercy of the indifferent forces which manipulate their behaviour and their relations with others; but they can achieve dignity through endurance, and heroism through simple strength of character:” Discuss in detail with reference to a novel you have studied.
8 All of her [George Elicits] characters are tested by situations in which they must choose, and the choices are often agonizingly painful.” Discuss Maggie Tolliver’s painful choices in The Mill on the Floss.