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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. According to Eagleton, in the romantic aesthetic theory the meaning of the word literature became what?
(a) Realism.
(b) Psychology.
(c) Communism.
(d) Ideology.

2. According to Eagleton, what is ironic about those who complain of the difficulty of literary theory?
(a) "That those who complain would not expect to understand a textbook of biology or chemical engineering."
(b) "That those who complain would expect to understand a textbook of biology or chemical engineering."
(c) "That those who complain are often uncivilised and uneducated."
(d) "That those who complain are often civilised and educated."

3. What is the name of the Russian formalist who published the pioneering essay that is the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?
(a) Alexander Pushkin.
(b) Fyodor Dostoevsky.
(c) Leo Tolstoy.
(d) Viktor Shklovsky.

4. According to Eagleton, what kind of thought does literary education NOT encourage?
(a) Rational thought.
(b) Irrational thought.
(c) Creative thought.
(d) Analytical thought.

5. For Eagleton, opposition between "historical" and "artistic" truth does NOT apply to what?
(a) Early Icelandic sagas.
(b) Fairy-tales.
(c) Middle English.
(d) Late Victorian novels.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is "imaginative" literature or literature that is not necessarily true?

2. According to Viktor Shklovsky, what novel was "the most typical novel in world literature" because it impeded its own story-line so that it never gets off the ground?

3. Eagleton argues that the criteria for what counted as literature in the eighteenth-century was what?

4. Eagleton argues that the readership his book has attracted dispels the notion that literary theory is what?

5. Who was Husserl's most famous pupil who broke with his system of thought?

Short Essay Questions

1. What were the Russian formalists responding to in terms of literary criticism?

2. During the eighteenth century, how was art perceived in England and why is it significant?

3. How does Eagleton define elitism in literary studies and why is it important?

4. What does "concretize" mean and why is it significant?

5. How has the population in higher education changed in Britain since the 1960s and what it its significance?

6. What was the romantics relationship to the symbol and why is it significant?

7. What is "Tristram Shandy" and why is it significant?

8. Why does Eagleton argue that the demarcation between fiction and fact in writing is "questionable"?

9. In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, what was considered "fact" and what was considered "fiction," and how is it significant?

10. How did the romantic movement develop and why is it significant?

(see the answer keys)

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