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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. When does Val cook complex meals?

2. What did Christabel LaMotte write?

3. What mood is Val in when Roland sees her?

4. What did Ash send his wife during his trip?

5. What reference to Christabel does Beatrice Nest find in Ellen Ash's journals?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why is Mrs. Wapshott unwilling to sell Ash's letters to Cropper?

2. How do the three apparitions describe themselves to the child?

3. How does Roland feel at the prospect of reading Christabel and Ash's letters?

4. Describe the relationship between Blackadder and Cropper.

5. What is Swammerdam's situation at the end of his life?

6. Where did Maud get the pin that she is wearing in her turban?

7. In her diary, how does Ellen describe the visit she gets while Ash is away?

8. What does Roland like about the library?

9. What do Roland and Maud do on their day trip?

10. What, in her own life, does Val compare Roland's work to?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

In the novel, reading is an active experience, which is greatly influenced by not only the writer's perspective but the reader's perspective. Discuss the role of the reader's bias in the novel.

1) How does Roland's life influence how he interprets Ash? How does this dynamic cause Blackadder, Roland, and Cropper to all have distinctive experiences of Ash?

2) How do the characters' readings of Ash and LaMotte change over the course of the novel, not because of what they learn about the poets, but because of changes in themselves? How do the characters' personal experiences and biases prevent objective understandings of the authors' intentions?

3) How do formal perspectives, like feminism, create a group bias in the reading of LaMotte? What other examples of this dynamic are there in the novel?

Essay Topic 2

In the novel, the characters are scholars who study two Victorian poets. Discuss the importance of poetry in the novel.

1) Why does Roland decide to write poems, and find a poetic voice, at the end of the novel? How is writing poetry different than studying and analyzing it?

2) What do poets accomplish with their poems in the novel? Who are the poems written for?

3) What causes poetry to persist over time in the novel? Why do the characters study poetry that is written far in the past?

Essay Topic 3

Discus the role of objects in the story, and how they are and are not invested with meaning.

1) What gives an object meaning? How do the letters that Roland finds have meaning, and why is the meaning only identified when Roland reads the letters?

2) How does context relate to meaning? Why can Maud only interpret Christabel's doll poem correctly in the context of Christabel's room? What other examples are there in the novel of context giving meaning to objects or words?

3) What meanings do the physical objects in Ash's box have? How are these meanings different for different people, in different contexts?

(see the answer keys)

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