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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, as the first industrialist capitalist nation, England becomes what kind of state?
(a) A wealthy state.
(b) A perfect state.
(c) A police state.
(d) A free state.

2. During the Romantic period, how is literature more than "idle escapism"?
(a) It is the rejection of creative values celebrated in English society.
(b) It is the acceptance of totalarian values rejected in English society.
(c) It is the celebration of totalarian values enforced in English society.
(d) It is the affirmation of creative values expunged from English society.

3. According to Eagleton, when did the Russian formalists emerge?
(a) Before the Bolshevik Revolution.
(b) After WWI.
(c) Before WWII.
(d) During the Russian Revolution.

4. Eagleton argues that for Stanley Fish, what a text "does" to us is a matter of what we do to what?
(a) To the author.
(b) To the text.
(c) To the critic.
(d) To the reader.

5. According to Eagleton, the approaches outlined in his book have implications where?
(a) Well beyond literature.
(b) Well beyond language.
(c) Well beyond feeling.
(d) Well beyond politics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What three sequential stages does Eagleton point out in the development of modern literary theory?

2. According to the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, literature represents "organized ______committed on ordinary _______."

3. What role does reception theory examine?

4. What date does Eagleton settle on as the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?

5. What person is NOT included in the ranks of Russian formalists?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the significance of Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay "Art as Device," according to Eagleton?

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

3. How does Eagleton respond to critics who claim that literary theory as irrelevant or elitist and what are its implications?

4. How did new criticism emerge in England and America?

5. In the nineteenth century, what was the outcome of religion as a result of the industrial revolution where new technologies and science were being developed?

6. What is Eagleton's argument regarding the literary canon as the "unquestioned" great tradition of national literature?

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

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

9. What was the dominant ideology of eighteenth-century England?

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

(see the answer keys)

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