Contexts of American Prose After 1925 - GRE Subject Test: Literature in English

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Question

There was a contention as far as a suit (in which, piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell, that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

The larger prose piece from which this passage was taken provided the title for a novel by which of the following authors?

Answer

The line "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" appears later in this sermon and provided the title for Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Adapted from "Meditation XVII" in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in My Sicknes by John Donne (1624)

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Question

Which of the following authors is not a Southern Gothic writer?

Answer

Hemingway was an expatriate who wrote terse, emotionally complex novels set mainly in Europe. He is not an exemplar of the Southern Gothic style, which is known for its setting of the American South and its use of macabre and grotesque events (often to provide social commentary).

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Question

The author of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, this Southern writer was an invalid for much of her life.

Answer

This is Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Gothic writer who suffered from lupus and is perhaps best known for short stories such as “Good Country People,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and “Parker’s Back.” Her works are deeply invested in moral and ethical questions and in probing psychological examinations of her often poor, uneducated Southern characters.

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Question

Which of the following novels is not set during a war?

Answer

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is set during World War II, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is set during the end of World War II, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are set during World War I and the Spanish Civil War, respectively. Only Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is set during peacetime.

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Question

This author set many of his novels in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. Who is he?

Answer

This is William Faulkner. Yoknapatawpha comes from a Cherokee phrase and is based on real places in Mississippi, and many of his novels—such as Absalom! Absalom!, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and _The Sound and the Fury—_are set here.

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Question

Which American writer is famous for a novel depicting the migration and struggles of the Okies during the Dust Bowl?

Answer

This is John Steinbeck, and the novel in question is the 1939 Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Grapes of Wrath. It is set during the Great Depression and centers on a family of indigent tenant farmers who move from Oklahoma to California.

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Question

Which of these writers is known for his dark, brooding western novels and polysyndetic sentence style?

Answer

This is Cormac McCarthy, whose novels include All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country For Old Men. His work often features apocalyptic settings, largely male casts, and dialogues of untranslated Spanish.

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Question

This 1958 novel features a storyline about an adult man who becomes obsessed with and begins a sexual relationship with a preteen girl.

Answer

This is Vladimir Nabokov’s highly controversial Lolita. Although the book was largely regarded as pornographic and received little critical acclaim when it was first published, it has since become one of the most highly regarded novels of the twentieth century.

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Question

This Dominican novelist won the 2008 Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Answer

The writer in question is Junot Díaz. His other works include story collections titled Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, and much of his short fiction revolves around Dominican-American immigrants.

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Question

A classic American novel by this author depicts the glittering, empty lives of flappers and their ilk in the Hamptons of the early twentieth century.

Answer

This is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925.

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Question

Who, by 2014, was the only African-American writer to win both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes?

Answer

This is Toni Morrison. Her novels, which include The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Sula, and Song of Solomon, feature deeply developed characters and examinations of race and history.

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Question

Which of the following writers was not an influential twentieth-century African-American novelist?

Answer

Don DeLillo is a white novelist known for works such as Underworld and White Noise.

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Question

What is the subject of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men?

Answer

Although Warren denied them, parallels were often drawn between Louisiana governor Huey Long’s rise to political power and the life of his novel’s characters.

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Question

Who is the author of The Shipping News?

Answer

The Shipping News (1993) is a novel by the American author E. Annie Proulx. Proulx was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for the novel.

Cormac McCarthy is the author of Blood Meridian (1985), David Foster Wallace is the author of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Corrections (2001), and Phillip Roth is the author of Portnoy's Complaint (1972)

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Question

Which of the following is a short story by the author of The Shipping News?

Answer

“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) is by Herman Melville, “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) is by O. Henry, “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) is by W.W. Jacobs, and “The Story of an Hour” (1894) is by Kate Chopin. “Brokeback Mountain” was published in 1997 by E. Annie Proulx.

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Question

During which decade was The Shipping News published?

Answer

E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News was published in 1993 and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

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Question

Which of the following is not another work by the author of The Shipping News?

Answer

Accordion Crimes (1996), Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (2004), and Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988) are all by E. Annie Proulx. The Big Sleep is a 1939 novel by Raymond Chandler.

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Question

Who is the author of Blood Meridian?

Answer

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) is Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Phillip Roth is the author of The Ghostwriter (1979), Raymond Chandler is the author of The High Window (1942), and Raymond Carver is the author of Cathedral (1983).

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Question

Which of the following is not another novel by the author of Blood Meridian?

Answer

McCarthy wrote The Road (2006), No Country For Old Men (2005), All the Pretty Horses (1992), and Suttree (1979). He did not, however, write Freedom; that title is a 2010 novel by Jonathan Franzen.

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Question

Which genre does Blood Meridian belong to?

Answer

Blood Meridian (1985) is set in the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s and early 1850s and concerns the adventures of a gang of scalp hunters. It is characterized as a Modern or Revisionist Western.

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