UGC NET English Paper 2 – December 2025 – Question Paper with Answer Key

Which novel is NOT part of Beckett's trilogy, published in one volume in London in 1959?

Which stage setting of Pinter's The Birthday Party is INCORRECT?

Assertion (A): The best-known mystery and miracle cycles come from York, Wakefield and Chester. Reason (R): King Alfred encouraged the vernacular in the late ninth century as second best to Latin.

Arrange the following novels by Hardy in chronological order:

1. A. The Trumpet-Major
2. B. The Hand of Ethelberta
3. C. Tess of the d'Urbervilles
4. D. The Woodlanders
5. E. The Return of the Native

A quoted letter, written while its author was at work on Shirley, discusses the difficulty of drawing male as against female characters. Who wrote it, and to whom?

Which description of a character in Congreve's The Way of the World is INCORRECT?

Shaw's Pygmalion draws on which tradition's myth of a sculptor who fell in love with his ivory statue?

Match List I with List II:

Which of the following is NOT a dystopian novel?

Which statements are correct?

1. A. The Kailyard school produced sentimental, idealised novels of Scottish small-town life in the 1890s.
2. B. 'Kailyard' means cabbage patch, suggesting parochial concerns.
3. C. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a lower-class detective novel titled Peter Pan.
4. D. J. I. M. Stewart's Lament for a Maker features Lord Peter Wimsey.
5. E. Barrie's A Window in Thrums is the best-known Kailyard text.

Assertion (A): Bacon's position as an essayist is peculiar. Reason (R): He bears no resemblance to essayists like Addison or Hazlitt.

Match List I with List II:

Arrange the following facts about Arms and the Man in chronological order:

1. A. First performance at the Avenue Theatre
2. B. British film directed by Cecil Lewis
3. C. German film adaptation nominated for an Academy Award
4. D. Action of the play: the Serbo-Bulgarian War
5. E. Old Vic revival with Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier

Match List I with List II:

Assertion (A): English poetry changed after 1945. Reason (R): Some poets carried on the Romantic tradition with personal, elemental themes.

Which statements about Chaucer are correct?

1. A. The Book of the Duchess commemorates Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, who died in 1368.
2. B. The House of Fame engages with Dante's Divine Comedy.
3. C. The Canterbury Tales goes beyond its many individual concerns.
4. D. The Legend of Good Women invokes Cupid and Venus.
5. E. The Miller's Tale resembles The Knight's Tale.

Which statement about a Forster novel is INCORRECT?

Arrange these statements in the order they occur in Bacon's 'Of Studies':

1. A. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring.
2. B. To spend too much time in studies is sloth.
3. C. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience.
4. D. Crafty men contemn studies.
5. E. Histories make men wise.

Arnold's Empedocles on Etna (1852) is an example of:

Arrange the following works in chronological order:

1. A. Browne, Religio Medici
2. B. Nashe, The Terrors of the Night
3. C. Lamb, Essays of Elia
4. D. More, Utopia
5. E. Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry

Assertion (A): The 9/11 attacks defined the early twenty-first century. Reason (R): Christopher Brookmyre's A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away, published just before them, was prescient.

Which details from the dramatis personae of The Duchess of Malfi are correct?

1. A. Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria
2. B. The Cardinal, 'Executioner'
3. C. Antonio Bologna, steward of the Duchess's household
4. D. Delio, 'Court Officer'
5. E. Daniel de Bosola, gentleman of the horse

In which Dickens novel does fog shroud London in the opening chapter?

Who speaks the line 'Put out the light, and then put out the light'?

Arrange the plays from which these lines come in chronological order:

1. A. 'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!'
2. B. 'All the world's a stage'
3. C. 'Come, violent death, serve for mandragora to make me sleep!'
4. D. 'The last temptation is the greatest treason'
5. E. 'Never speak disrespectfully of Society'

Assertion (A): India has a dozen or more major languages and literatures, largely regional. Reason (R): The Aryans brought Sanskrit, Muslim rule produced Urdu as the expression of a composite culture, and British rule made Indo-Anglian literature possible.

Which statements about Mulk Raj Anand are correct?

1. A. He was educated at Lahore, London and Cambridge and took a doctorate in philosophy.
2. B. He joined the Progressive Writers' Movement and settled in London after the War.
3. C. In Coolie, evil appears as greed, selfishness and inhumanity in many forms.
4. D. In The Barbers' Trade Union he immortalises Munoo the barber as he did Bakha.
5. E. His early novels draw on the lived reality of everyday existence.

Match List I with List II:

Which book records the 'adventures of a brown man in search of civilization'?

Match List I with List II:

In which Anita Desai novel does the heroine, pregnant for the fifth time, leave her husband for the island of Manori?

Which is NOT one of Sharankumar Limbale's reformulations in his Dalit aesthetics?

Arrange the following institutions in the order in which they began teaching Indian Writing in English:

1. A. Central Institute of English, Hyderabad
2. B. University of Mysore
3. C. Karnatak University
4. D. Andhra University
5. E. Osmania University

Karnad's Hayavadana and Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads are based on a tale from:

Whose poetry is steeped in the Orissa scene, with the Jagannatha temple at Puri recurring?

Which of the following are chapter titles in I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)?

1. A. 'Poetry for Poetry's Sake'
2. B. 'Critical Principles: The Indemonstrability of Values'
3. C. 'On Looking at a Picture'
4. D. 'The Theory of Interpretation'
5. E. 'The Analysis of a Poem'

Which quotations are correctly matched with their texts?

1. A. Poets are 'the right popular philosophers' — An Apology for Poetry
2. B. The critic must halt at the frontier of metaphysics — 'The Metaphysical Poets'
3. C. 'Frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies' — Preface to Lyrical Ballads
4. D. 'For poetry the idea is everything' — 'The Study of Poetry'
5. E. A fool might once himself alone expose; now one in verse makes many more in prose — An Essay on Man

Match List I with List II:

Assertion (A): Sidney's Apology for Poetry is a seminal text of literary criticism. Reason (R): It is the first English synthesis of Renaissance criticism, drawing on Aristotle, Horace, Boccaccio and Scaliger.

Which work by Arnold preaches that 'the kingdom of God is within you'?

Which issue does Horace NOT address in the Ars Poetica?

Arrange the following critical works in chronological order:

1. A. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
2. B. J. C. Smith, A Study of Wordsworth
3. C. D. G. James, Scepticism and Poetry
4. D. Marjorie L. Barstow, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction
5. E. Josephine Miles, Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century

Arrange Kuntaka's levels of vakrata (obliquity) from the smallest to the largest unit:

1. A. Episodic (prakarana)
2. B. Compositional (prabandha)
3. C. Phonetic (varna-vinyasa)
4. D. Lexical (pada-purvardha)
5. E. Grammatical (pratyaya)

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Assertion (A): Post-structuralism and deconstruction are virtually synonymous. Reason (R): Deconstruction arises out of Barthes's structuralism, as a reaction against its certainties.

Which statement on the arbitrariness of the sign in Saussure's Course is INCORRECT?

According to Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, which symbol is NOT correctly glossed?

Who held that the interplay of introjection and projection builds the ego and superego and lays the ground for the Oedipus complex?

Assertion (A): The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, and to increase the difficulty and length of perception. Reason (R): The process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

Who became known in the popular imagination as the notorious French postmodernist philosopher?

Which of the following were written or edited by Toril Moi?

1. A. French Feminist Thought: A Reader
2. B. Feminisms: A Reader
3. C. Feminist Literary Criticism
4. D. Sexual/Textual Politics
5. E. What Is a Woman?

Which writer asked why men drank wine and women water, and why one sex was so prosperous and the other so poor?

Match List I with List II:

In which of Showalter's phases did women writers imitate the dominant male tradition?

Match List I with List II:

Which is NOT part of Dollimore and Sinfield's definition of cultural materialism?

According to Fiona Tolan, the one theme that runs through every feminist debate is:

Which critic defined colonialism as 'the conquest and control of other people's land and goods'?

Will Wright finds that the professional Western reverses the binary oppositions of the classic Western. Arrange the oppositions in the order John Storey reports them:

1. A. Hero – society
2. B. Outside society – inside society
3. C. Good – bad
4. D. Weak – strong
5. E. Wilderness – civilisation

Assertion (A): Television is the popular cultural form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reason (R): Meanings are not simply transmitted but always produced, first by the encoder from the raw material of everyday life, then by the audience according to its place in other discourses.

Who called culture 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language'?

Who argued that the audience's power 'derives from the fact that meanings do not circulate in the cultural economy in the same way that wealth does in the financial'?

Arrange the following works on the essay film in chronological order:

1. A. As You See
2. B. Notebook on Cities and Clothes
3. C. 'The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film'
4. D. 'The Camera-Stylo'
5. E. 'Notes for a Film of Capital'

Which of the following were written by Ien Ang?

1. A. 'Wanted: Audiences'
2. B. 'Culture and Communication: Towards an Ethnographic Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System'
3. C. 'The Photographic Message'
4. D. 'Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure'
5. E. 'On Popular Music'

Which four sub-codes does Angela McRobbie identify in Jackie (1978)?

Match List I with List II:

According to Jeremy Hawthorn, which work 'prepared the ground for the development of theories of the gaze'?

Match List I with List II:

Arrange the following novels in chronological order:

1. A. The Handmaid's Tale
2. B. Lucky Jim
3. C. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
4. D. Things Fall Apart

Herder, Goethe and Schiller experimented with new subjective modes of expression as part of:

Who wrote: 'Like his favourite philosopher, Plato, Rousseau sought to discover and produce the moral man' in a moral society?

What is the space between the vocal folds called?

Arrange the manners of articulation of English consonants by degree of stricture, from greatest to least:

1. A. Close approximation
2. B. Intermittent closure
3. C. Complete closure with sudden release
4. D. Complete closure with slow release
5. E. Open approximation

Which of the following is a functional morpheme?

Match List I with List II:

Arrange the words in ascending order of number of syllables:

1. A. demonstrate
2. B. orange
3. C. girl
4. D. agriculture
5. E. relativity

Which definition of a social variety of language is INCORRECT?

Which statements about voiced and voiceless sounds are correct?

1. A. All twenty vowels of English are voiced.
2. B. With the vocal cords apart, voiceless sounds are produced.
3. C. Rapid opening and closing of the vocal cords produces voiceless sounds.
4. D. Fifteen of the twenty-four English consonants are voiced.
5. E. The organs of articulation include parts of the leg and hand.

Assertion (A): All modern languages have words whose pronunciation echoes natural sounds. Reason (R): Early humans imitated sounds such as 'caw-caw' and 'coo-coo' and used them for the objects even when absent.

In an English initial cluster of three consonants, the first is always:

How should a work by eight authors (Rita Charon, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Hermann and five others) be listed in MLA 9?

Which in-text citation is INCORRECT?

Match List I with List II:

Arrange the parts of a thesis in the order in which they appear:

1. A. Bibliography
2. B. Introduction
3. C. Conclusion
4. D. Table of contents
5. E. Preface

Coleridge spoke of 'three silent revolutions in England'. Which is NOT one of them?

Why is the last lover 'proud' and 'victorious'?

Why did the lady reject all her suitors?

What does the refrain 'Go, go, go, seek some otherwhere, / Importune me no more!' stand for?

What does 'When I was fair and young, and favour gracèd me' suggest?

What did the lady repent?

What, according to the author, is the danger of satire?

In the passage, 'secret stabs' stands for:

What excuse does the author allow for ill-natured satirists?

What is made the object of ridicule and buffoonery?

What troubles the author most?