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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. Eagleton writes that "New Criticism was the ideology of an ________, _______intelligentsia who reinvented in literature what they could not locate in reality."
(a) Apathetic, placid.
(b) Aggressive, violent.
(c) Uprooted, defensive.
(d) Educated, grounded.

2. What kind of analysis is phenomenology, according to Eagleton?
(a) Uncritical and discursive.
(b) Critical and discursive.
(c) Uncritical and non-evaluative.
(d) Discursive and non-evaluative.

3. Eagleton argues that the criteria for what counted as literature in the eighteenth-century was what?
(a) Ideological.
(b) Canonical.
(c) Religious.
(d) Practical.

4. 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 affirmation of creative values expunged from English society.
(c) It is the acceptance of totalarian values rejected in English society.
(d) It is the celebration of totalarian values enforced in English society.

5. According to Eagleton, what becomes the "panacea for all problems" as part of the romantics' aesthetic theory at the turn of the eighteenth century?
(a) The symbol.
(b) The word.
(c) The image.
(d) The text.

Short Answer Questions

1. 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?

2. For the economist Eagleton discusses, "those economists who dislike theory or claimed to get along better without it" were what?

3. For the Romantics, why was their vision of a just society was inverted into a nostalgia for an old and "organic" England?

4. According to Eagleton, who "harnessed this Romantic humanism to the cause of the working class" in the late nineteenth-century?

5. What role does reception theory examine?

Short Essay Questions

1. What period of literature did the critic Roland Barthes focus on and why is it significant?

2. 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?

3. What is Eagleton's goal in writing "Literary Theory: An Introduction"?

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

5. Why does Eagleton call the emergence and development of literary theory a "theoretical revolution" and what does it signify?

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

7. What is hermeneutics and how is it significant?

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

9. What did the critic E.D. Hirsch, Jr. believe about the reader's relationship to a text?

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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