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

Short Answer Questions

1. Whose horse wins the horse race?

2. Who does Euan believe rightfully owns Christabel and Ash's letters today?

3. What does Val say that she's not very good at?

4. What does Cropper entice Sir George by offering?

5. What poem is James Blackadder annotating at the beginning of Chapter 17?

Short Essay Questions

1. What are Cropper's relationships with the Ash family like?

2. How does the medium in the poem introduce her practices to the apprentice?

3. Where has Euan located Cropper and Hildebrand?

4. What is Maud and Roland's relationship in France like?

5. What happens at Sabine's house when Christabel disappears?

6. What do Leonora and Blackadder do when Cropper's Mercedes passes them on the road?

7. How does Val feel about her new relationship?

8. What does Maud fear in relationships?

9. What is the result of the knight drinking the cup offered to him by Melusine?

10. How do Maud and Roland react to Euan's phone call?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Knowledge and reality are constructed in different ways throughout the novel, and one way is by the consensus of a society. Discuss knowledge and reality as a group agreement in the novel.

1) Discuss the story of the giant that Ash writes about from Yorkshire. How do the local people create knowledge through myth? Identify other examples of this in the novel.

2) How do scholarly groups create reality through consensus in the novel? How does this affect the relationship between what is known and the objective truth?

3) What happens when the individual's perspective is different from the group consensus, as with Swammerdam?

Essay Topic 2

The novel follows two parallel stories, one in the past and one in the present. Discuss the relationship of the past and the present in the novel.

1) How is communication possible between the past and the present?

2) What drives the characters to try to understand the past? Why does Roland study the past?

3) What do parallels between the past and the present say about human experience?

Essay Topic 3

Discuss point of view in the novel.

1) What different points of view does the novel use to present both modern and historical events? Why does the author present events from different perspectives? How does point of view affect the interpretation of events?

2) How do the characters', particularly Roland and Maud's, perspectives change over the course of the novel?

3) How are Ash and LaMotte's perspectives of themselves different from the perspectives of others, both in their own time and in the future?

(see the answer keys)

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