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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 1, The Writer's Nature, Pages 34-72.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In what novel does Levin propose to Kitty, as cited in Chapter 1?
(a) Emma.
(b) Nicholas Nickleby.
(c) Anna Karenina.
(d) Crime and Punishment.

2. To whose poetry and prose had Gardner made allusions to in the novel Grendel?
(a) Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
(b) Lord Byron.
(c) William Blake.
(d) Percy Shelley.

3. What does Gardner say that good fiction starts off in the reader's head?
(a) A continuous dream.
(b) A hunger for more.
(c) A nightmare.
(d) An addiction.

4. What author does Gardner say was known to arrive at a party and sit for ten minutes or more staring at guests and not answering when people addressed him in Chapter1?
(a) Anthony Trollope.
(b) Moliere.
(c) F. Scott Fitzgerald.
(d) James Joyce.

5. Which philosopher maintained that nothing a writer writes means anything, "all the words are a lunatic blithering," since all language is by nature false and misleading?
(a) Nietzsche.
(b) Plato.
(c) Kant.
(d) Heidegger.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who is the author of Piers Plowman?

2. What is the name of the man who moves next door to his teenage daughter in Gardner's hypothetical story in Chapter 1?

3. Of whose writing does Gardner say that no reader can doubt the impulse to capture real life, "the special quality of country-Welsh craziness"?

4. Gardner suggests that the dazzling poetry of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech is not the same poetry that who speaks?

5. Gardner writes in Chapter 1 that when the central character is a victim there is no what?

(see the answer key)

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