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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, Gibbon and the authors of Genesis share what in common?
(a) Both wrote fiction that is read as fact by some and fiction by others.
(b) They both thought they were writing historical truth, but are read as fact by some and fiction by others.
(c) Both wrote historical truth that is read as fiction.
(d) Both wrote fiction that is read as historical fact.

2. Who was glad to abandon the "feminine vagaries of literature" in favor of penning war propaganda?
(a) George Gordon.
(b) Lord Byron.
(c) Matthew Arnold.
(d) Walter Raleigh.

3. 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 critic.
(c) To the reader.
(d) To the text.

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

5. For Eagleton, Gadamer's theory only holds if one makes what "enormous assumption"?
(a) That there are multiple traditions.
(b) That there is a single, mainstream tradition.
(c) That there are multiple modernities.
(d) That there is a single, mainstream modernity.

Short Answer Questions

1. For Eagleton, how did the romantics usher a "forestalling of reasoned critical enquiry"?

2. According to Eagleton, why is Hans-Georg Gadamer not concerned about bringing our cultural preconceptions to a literary work?

3. According to Eagleton, literature is definable "not according to whether it is fictional or "imaginative," because it uses language in ____ways."

4. Both F.R. Leavis and Edmund Husserl seek to grasp the thing in itself, or the ______for Husserl and ______for Leavis.

5. According to Eagleton, William Empson "insists on treating poetry as a species of ______language."

Short Essay Questions

1. What is phenomenology and when did it emerge as a serious discipline?

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

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

4. How does phenomenological criticism view literature and what is Eagleton's response?

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

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

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

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

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

10. What kinds of writing were considered literature in the eighteenth-century and why is this significant?

(see the answer keys)

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