View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Eagleton, "theory was a way of _______ literary works from the ________of civilised sensibility'"

2. During the last decades of the eighteenth-century, the word prosaic begins to acquire what a kind of connotation?

3. How do linguists describe the effect of language where "the texture, rhythm and resonance of words are in excess of their abstractable meaning."

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

5. For Eagleton, Gadamer's theory only holds if one makes what "enormous assumption"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does "concretize" mean 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. In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, what was considered "fact" and what was considered "fiction," and how is it significant?

4. What is hermeneutics and how is it significant?

5. How did the Russian formalists answer the question "what is literature?" and why was it significant?

6. What did new American criticism focus on and why is it significant?

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

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Compare and contrast the arguments for and against literary theory.

1) According to Eagleton, why have people opposed literary theory?

2) What is Eagleton's position regarding literary theory?

Essay Topic 2

Choose one work of literature (a story, essay, poem, play, or novel) and one method of literary analysis (new criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis) and examine the work by utilizing a specific literary theory.

Essay Topic 3

Discuss the ways in which the concept of literature has changed from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century.

1) What was considered literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

2) How do the romantic movement transform the definition of literature?

3) What was the function of literature during the Victorian era?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 759 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample