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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 "twin impacts" does Eagleton cite in the mid-Victorian period that was particularly worrisome to the ruling class?
(a) Religious ideology and social change.
(b) Scientific discovery and social change.
(c) Scientific discovery and religious ideology.
(d) Religious ideology and social statis.

2. What genre of writing does Eagleton provide that is an example of writing that is NOT considered to be literature?
(a) Comics.
(b) Young Adult.
(c) Romance.
(d) Science fiction.

3. Eagleton argues that if literature includes much factual writing, it also excludes "quite a lot of" what?
(a) Nonfiction.
(b) Autobiography.
(c) Fiction.
(d) Biography.

4. Eagleton argues that a literary work in Romantic society becomes what rather than rational and mechanical?
(a) Ideological.
(b) Progressive.
(c) Spontaneous.
(d) Interesting.

5. For Eagleton, opposition between "historical" and "artistic" truth does NOT apply to what?
(a) Late Victorian novels.
(b) Fairy-tales.
(c) Early Icelandic sagas.
(d) Middle English.

Short Answer Questions

1. What year did Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory: An Introduction" first appear?

2. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl argued that objects can be regarded as things ______ by consciousness.

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

4. What is the name of the American hermeneuticist E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s famous 1967 book?

5. According to Eagleton, formalism is the application of what to the study of literature?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What period of literature did the critic Roland Barthes focus on and why is it significant?

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

4. What were the Russian formalists responding to in terms of literary criticism?

5. How did the romantic movement develop and why is it significant?

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

7. How is Martin Heidegger's philosophy similar to that of the Russian formalists?

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

9. What did the critic E.D. Hirsch, Jr. believe about the reader's relationship to a text?

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

(see the answer keys)

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