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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Introduction: What is Literature?.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What example from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries does Eagleton provide that was not considered purely factual?
(a) Sermons.
(b) Decrees.
(c) Novels.
(d) News.

2. According to Eagleton, the "very meaning of _______, ________ and _________ has undergone deep alteration."
(a) Art; theory; practise.
(b) Film; viewing; education.
(c) Power; authority; freedom.
(d) Literature; reading; criticism.

3. What kind of language does Eagleton say people think of literature as?
(a) Dull.
(b) Strange.
(c) Difficult.
(d) Ordinary.

4. According to Eagleton, the formalists were not out to define literature but they were out to define what?
(a) Literariness.
(b) Realism.
(c) Inventiveness.
(d) Criticism.

5. According to Eagleton, what kind of age do we live in, where "meaning, like everything else, is expected to be instantly consumable"?
(a) Esoteric.
(b) Modern.
(c) Traditional.
(d) Postmodern.

Short Answer Questions

1. How many decades, according to Eagleton, has there been a "striking proliferation of literary theory" since the publication of the Russian formalist's pioneering essay?

2. According to Eagleton, the Russian formalist shifted their attention to the "material reality" of what?

3. What is the name of the economist Eagleton discusses in his preface?

4. According to Eagleton, the sentence "this is awfully squiggly handwriting" from Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" tells him its literary because of what reason?

5. According to Eagleton, what kind of thought does literary education NOT encourage?

(see the answer key)

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