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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. What was novel about the essay according to Boorstin?
(a) It celebrated the self.
(b) It allowed for new definitions of community.
(c) It preserved traditional confessional literary traditions in a new form.
(d) It was combined fiction and non-fiction.

2. Boorstin says that Dickens' work was a love affair with what?
(a) Future technologies.
(b) The English people.
(c) The New World.
(d) English history.

3. How does Boorstin characterize the Heroic American Literary Myth?
(a) A tale of revenge and madness.
(b) A tale of shining visions fulfilled.
(c) A tale of morality and sacrifice.
(d) A tale of brutality and crude mysticism.

4. Where does Boorstin say Kafka's charm is to be found?
(a) In his ambiguity.
(b) In his restraint from suicide.
(c) In his affection for his own demise.
(d) In his absurdism.

5. What does Boorstin say Eliot tried to express in "The Waste Land"?
(a) Compensation.
(b) Redemption.
(c) Incoherence.
(d) Sadness.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Boorstin say was combined in the skyscraper?

2. What happened to Milton before he wrote Paradise Lost?

3. How does Boorstin characterize Wordsworth's best work?

4. What made Lyrical Ballads revolutionary according to Boorstin?

5. Whom does Boorstin say was the first biographer?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Boorstin say is Dostoevsky's contribution to imaginative literature?

2. What is the place of the essay in the history Boorstin is describing?

3. Where does Boorstin put Kafka in his portrait of imaginative thinkers?

4. When does Boorstin say authors became the subject of their own writing?

5. What is Coleridge's importance in imaginative literature according to Boorstin?

6. Why does Boorstin say Goethe's Faust is an important work?

7. How did dance change during the transition into modernity?

8. In what way did T. S. Eliot change the course of literature's evolution?

9. How does Boorstin characterize Michelangelo's contribution to human culture?

10. What innovation does Boorstin say Leonardo da Vinci made in imaginative art?

(see the answer keys)

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