Mock 15 – Modern & Contemporary British Literature (Part 2)

Priestley belonged to an older generation. Osborne (Look Back in Anger), Amis (Lucky Jim) and Colin Wilson (The Outsider) were grouped as Angry Young Men in the 1950s.

Dennis's satire Cards of Identity (1955); Orwell's first book, Down and Out (1933); Schorer's formalist essay 'Technique as Discovery' (1948); Nietzsche's The Gay Science (1882), where 'God is dead' is proclaimed.

Middlemarch (1871–72) → Heart of Darkness (1899) → The Good Soldier (1915) → Night and Day (1919) → A Passage to India (1924).

Sons and Lovers (1913) → The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914) → The Rainbow (1915) → Women in Love (1920) → Kangaroo (1923).

Shaw's play (1893) is about prostitution and women's economic dependence. Ryan's narrator is autistic, Zevin's Sam lives with a crippling foot injury, and Heaberlin's Odette has lost a leg.

The Brangwen saga is The Rainbow (1915), and the novel's centre is Paul's overpowering attachment to his mother Gertrude, which blights his loves for Miriam and Clara. A, B and C are true (Cardiff's film, 1960).

The keyed answer stresses the play's form: a static, circular action in which 'nothing happens, twice' (Vivian Mercier), and dialogue whose breakdown — Lucky's speech, the cross-talk of Vladimir and Estragon — conveys post-war despair. The play holds no political (communist) programme.

The definition opens Marjorie Boulton's The Anatomy of Drama (1960): a play is meant to be performed, not only read.

Note: Option 1 was garbled in the source and restored from the keyed answer.

Pound, disillusioned after the war, left London for Paris in 1920; his farewell to English culture is also the theme of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).

Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd (1961) reads the breakdown of language as itself expressive: language that fails conveys a world without meaning (A) and the purposeless, illogical human condition Camus called absurd (D).

The Egoist (1914–19, published Imagist work), The Criterion (Eliot, 1922–39) and The English Review (Ford Madox Hueffer, 1908) were modernist periodicals. The Hundred and One Dalmatians is Dodie Smith's children's novel (1956).

The Scottish poet-dramatist Joanna Baillie (Plays on the Passions, 1798–1812) wrote the poem; it was collected in Fugitive Verses (1840).

The close of 'Snake' (Birds, Beasts and Flowers, 1923): having thrown a log at the snake at his Sicilian water-trough, the speaker feels he has insulted a king of the underworld.

Privately printed in Florence (1928), Lady Chatterley's Lover was published unexpurgated by Penguin in 1960. Penguin was acquitted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 and sold some three million copies.

'Sunday Morning' (1933; Poems 1935) → 'Bagpipe Music' (1937; The Earth Compels, 1938) → 'Entirely' (1940; Plant and Phantom, 1941) → 'Prayer Before Birth' (1944; Springboard) → 'Star-gazer' (1963; The Burning Perch).

Philip Larkin, aged nineteen, wrote to his friend Jim Sutton (1942) of his rapture at Sons and Lovers; Lawrence remained his lifelong idol.

The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955) and The Whitsun Weddings (1964) are Larkin's. Death of a Naturalist (1966) is Heaney's debut and Responsibilities (1914) is Yeats's.

Alan Sinfield (Yale UP, 1999), the cultural materialist critic of the University of Sussex.

Isherwood's fictionalised autobiography Lions and Shadows (1938); Spender's The Still Centre (1939); MacNeice's Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936); Auden's commentary on The Tempest, The Sea and the Mirror (1944).

Greene's memoir A Sort of Life (1971); Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Orwell's Down and Out (1933); Lessing's Rhodesian debut The Grass Is Singing (1950).

Heaney (1989–94), Fenton (1994–99) and Muldoon (1999–2004) held the chair, which was founded in 1708. Atwood and Sexton never did.

'The Movement' (named by J. D. Scott in The Spectator, 1954; anthology New Lines, 1956) included Larkin, Davie, Amis, Enright, Jennings, Gunn and Wain. H. D. was an Imagist, Longley is a Northern Irish poet and Walcott a Caribbean one.

Mac Flecknoe (1682) → The Hind and the Panther (1687) → The Wild Swans at Coole (1917/1919) → The Tower (1928) → The Whitsun Weddings (1964).

Jonson's 'To Penshurst' (1616) founded the country-house poem, praising a patron's estate and virtue, and Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House' (c. 1651) extends it.

Note: A and B are both dramatic monologues, so the stem is loosely worded; the key intends the country-house pair.