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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Forster considers a novel to be any fictitious prose over __________ words.
(a) 50,000.
(b) 60,000.
(c) 100,000.
(d) 30,000.

2. What does Forster believe a good novel is "sogged with"?
(a) Story.
(b) Plot.
(c) Humanity.
(d) Action.

3. Forster says that permanency is one of the illusions attached to what?
(a) Sleep.
(b) Death.
(c) Love.
(d) Birth.

4. Forster discusses the death of the character Mrs.Proudie in a novel by whom?
(a) Dickens.
(b) Trollope.
(c) Austen.
(d) Tolstoy.

5. Whose characters does Forster describe as being as "flat as a photograph"?
(a) Charles Dickens.
(b) Leo Tolstoy.
(c) Jane Austen.
(d) H.G. Wells.

Short Answer Questions

1. Through characters, novels give the reader the illusion of _________________.

2. What is the highest common factor to all novels?

3. Who tries to abolish time in a novel according to Forster?

4. In the People section, Forster says that novelists are appealing to more than our _________ when it comes to the characters of a novel.

5. In a work in which the author classifies novels by weather, how many different headings are there?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Forster look at in terms of characters in the second section on People?

2. What is striking about the funerals described in the excerpts by H.G. Wells and Charles Dickens?

3. What does Forster consider to be the strangest of the five basic elements of life?

4. What does Forster mean when he says that novels give us the "illusion of perspicacity"?

5. What does Forster say is the difference between a novel and a memoir?

6. Why does Forster believe an Austen novel is more complicated than a Defoe novel?

7. What does Forster believe to be the flaws in Sir Walter Scott's writing?

8. What is one of the reasons that love is "unduly prominent" in novels, according to Forster?

9. What commonality does Forster see between the writings of Henry James and Samuel Richardson?

10. What is Forster's definition of a pseudo-scholar?

(see the answer keys)

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