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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. What do Maud and Roland do when they find other scholars have followed the trail to France?

2. How do Maud and Roland travel to France?

3. What does Roland say to Blackadder after the meeting?

4. What covers the garden's lawn?

5. Why doesn't Ellen show Ash what Christabel has sent?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. How does Ash show Christabel that she is not a possession?

4. What similarities are there between Christabel and Ash's trip and Roland and Maud's trip?

5. What are all the things Ellen puts in the box?

6. How do Roland and Maud feel about each other?

7. Where has Euan located Cropper and Hildebrand?

8. How does the subject of Christabel and Ash's letters come up at the race track?

9. What does the knight tell Melusine when he first sees her?

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

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

The novel is subtitled "a romance." Discuss the ways in which the novel is a romance.

1) How is intellectual investigation a kind of romance? How are the characters obsessed and entranced by what they are investigating?

2) How do the characters make romantic connections with each other? What is romance, in the context of the novel?

3) How is the novel a romance, in the sense of being a fantasy?

Essay Topic 3

One of the fundamental ideas in the novel is the nature of knowledge. Discuss knowledge and unknowability in the novel.

1) How is the characters' knowledge about their poets thrown into upheaval? How does what the characters "know" differ from objective truth?

2) What knowledge do the characters have about each other? How does Roland's knowledge of Maud change over the course of the novel?

3) What does the postscript at the end of the novel say about knowledge and its limits?

(see the answer keys)

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