American Literature

Which of the following first recognized Walt Whitman as the great poet of the democratic spirit of America?

(A) Nathaniel Hawthorne
(B) Ralph Waldo Emerson
(C) Herman Melville
(D) Edgar Allan Poe
(E) Henry David Thoreau

2.The “unpardonable sin” committed by Ethan Brand is

(A) allowing one’s intellectual curiosity to violate the privacy of others
(B) any mortal transgression not followed by repentance
(C) the attempt to improve upon God’s handiwork
(D) loss of faith in God (E) ambition deteriorating into a lust for power

In The Federalist, No. X, James Madison proposed that the dangers of factions be controlled by a

(A) republican form of government
(B) pure democracy
(C) curtailment of individual liberty
(D) reapportionment of property
(E) clause for emergency rule by a minority

Characters with the last names of Snopes, Compson, and Sartoris figure prominently in the fiction of

(A) Eudora Welty
(B) Flannery O’Connor
(C) Thomas Wolfe
(D) William Faulkner
(E) Robert Penn Warren

Which of the following poets derived the title, the plan, and much of the symbolism of one of his or her major poems from Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance?

(A) Wallace Stevens
(B) T.S. Eliot
(C) Robert Frost
(D) Marianne Moore
(E) Langston Hughes

About which of the following works did Ernest Hemingway say, “It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that”?

(A) The Last of the Mohicans
(B) Moby Dick
(C) The Scarlet Letter
(D) Walden
(E) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Which of the following writers was particularly important in the development of the short story as a literary form?

(A) James Fenimore Cooper
(B) Harriet Beecher Stowe
(C) Frederick Douglass
(D) Edgar Allan Poe
(E) Edith Wharton

Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate, Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee. Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee. My Conversation make to be thy Reele And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.

The passage above is notable chiefly for

(A) irony of statement
(B) pathetic fallacy
(C) a literary conceit
(D) a paradox
(E) a simile

Which of the following best states the theme of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”?

(A) Human beings are largely responsible for their own fate.
(B) By acts of courage, people may overcome inherent weakness.
(C) Nature, though seemingly hostile, is actually indifferent to human beings.
(D) Through perseverance, a world of peace and harmony will ultimately be achieved.
(E) In any struggle, the strongest are fated to survive.

In The Great Gatsby, who is directly responsible for the death of Myrtle Wilson?

(A) Daisy Buchanan
(B) Jay Gatsby
(C) Tom Buchanan
(D) Nick Carraway
(E) George Wilson

Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James are commonly described by literary historians as

(A) transcendentalists
(B) symbolists
(C) realists
(D) romantics
(E) naturalists

All of the following were written by Toni Morrison EXCEPT

(A) Song of Solomon
(B) Beloved
(C) The Bluest Eye
(D) Sula
(E) The Color Purple

Which of the following novels has as its main concern the experiences of an African Ameri- can protagonist?

(A) All the King’s Men
(B) The Age of Innocence
(C) Henderson the Rain King
(D) Invisible Man
(E) The Catcher in the Rye

Which of the following does NOT appear in a poem by Emily Dickinson?

(A) A fly in a still room making an “uncertain stumbling buzz”
(B) A slanted ray of late-afternoon winter sunlight
(C) A rain-filled red wheelbarrow “beside the white chickens”
(D) A train metaphorically described in terms of a horse
(E) A saddened person who “never lost as much but twice”

The King and the Duke in Mark Twain’s Adven- tures of Huckleberry Finn are

(A) aristocrats
(B) confidence men
(C) slaves
(D) tradesmen
(E) slave traders