question

Which of the following was NOT common in early Puritan literature?

answer

Short Stories

question

Which of the following is NOT a literary device typical of Native American literature?

answer

Sarcasm

question

To whom was William Bradford referring to when he used the term "Saint" to describe some of his fellow voyagers at sea?

answer

His fellow Puritans

question

Who has earned the nickname "The Father of the American Novel"?

answer

Charles Brockden Brown

question

Who wrote the first American slave autobiography after obtaining his freedom?

answer

Olaudah Equiano

question

Censorship by which of the following helped to determine the content of early American literature?

answer

Protestants

question

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story The Birthmark, Aylmer commits a fatal error when his

answer

faith in science causes him to try to improve on nature

question

How was the envelope in the story The Purloined Letter hidden?

answer

In plain sight

question

The former viewed nature as comprehensible and a source of divine inspiration and a new spirit of American individualism, while the later saw it as a savage force—beautiful but alien and perilous.

answer

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville

question

I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—mean the law-copyists or scriveners.

answer

Herman Melville

question

Which author's polemical anti-slavery novel was first published as episodes in the weekly The National Era?

answer

Harriet Beecher Stowe

question

All of the following are known primarily as poets active during the American Romantic period EXCEPT (Lowell, Longfellow, Whitman, Dickinson)

answer

Emerson

question

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

answer

Ralph Waldo Emerson

question

Which Boston Brahmin poet published The Courtship of Miles Standish in 1858?

answer

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

question

What is the setting for the protagonist's walk with the devil in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown?

answer

A path in the forest

question

Which of the following was the preeminent female essayist of the transcendentalist period in American literature?

answer

Margaret Fuller

question

Which of the following is set among a cannibalistic tribe in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific?

answer

Typee

question

Which poem describes the narrator's "sorrow for the lost Lenore"?

answer

The Raven

question

Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser are best categorized as

answer

Naturalists

question

Considered one of Theodore Dreiser's greatest works, this book tells the story of a poor young man's futile effort to achieve social and financial success; the attempt ends in his execution for murder.

answer

An American Tragedy

question

In Mark Twain's novels, what role does Judge Thatcher play in Huck Finn's life?

answer

He controls Huck's money.

question

The main character of Chopin's The Awakening is

answer

Edna Pontellier

question

Which of the following stories portrays a woman's descent into insanity while being given a "rest cure" after the birth of her child?

answer

The Yellow Wallpaper

question

A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say.

answer

Henry James

question

Which of the following stories concerns an execution carried out during civil war?

answer

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

question

Which novelist and critic wrote the successful play The Mouse Trap in 1889 that was set in the Boston Back Bay neighborhood?

answer

William Dean Howells

question

desire to realistically expose the problems caused by modern living a reaction to the homogenizing effect of industrialization wider magazine circulation, greater female readership

answer

increased regional nature of American fiction in the 1800s

question

The fictional village of Starkfield, setting of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, is located in which state?

answer

Massachusetts

question

Which of the following was a political radical who argued for women's rights and against capitalism?

answer

Emma Goldman

question

Which author associated manhood and maturity with nonconformity?

answer

Ralph Waldo Emerson

question

James Fenimore Cooper Walt Whitman Jack Kerouac John Steinbeck

answer

wrote of heroes wandering the open roads

question

And now he died. Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning - which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork that was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl. No one was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable. Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the child would have to be buried by the city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at this the poor woman almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands and screaming with grief and despair. Her child to be buried in a pauper's grave!

answer

Muckraking, Theodore Dreiser

question

influential epic poem symbolizes Western civilization as a dry desert needing the rain of spiritual renewal

answer

T. S. Elliot's "The Waste Land"

question

Which writer who described his poetic style as objectivist aimed to bring an almost photographic clarity to his work with concrete images?

answer

William Carlos Williams

question

modern poet wrote poetry while working as an insurance executive

answer

Wallace Stevens

question

Which poet wrote the epic poem "Paterson" about his/her hometown of Paterson, NJ?

answer

William Carlos Williams

question

in Just- spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee and eddy and bill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring

answer

e.e. cummings

question

What is symbolized by "the valley of ashes" in Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gastby?

answer

moral and social decay

question

Yoknapatawpha county appears in the works of

answer

William Faulkner

question

Which African-American poet integrated the rhythms of blues and jazz into his/her poetry?

answer

Langston Hughes

question

Which of the following novels traces the rise and fall of a Southern politician?

answer

All the King's Men

question

John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and others campaigned against the growth of fascism in Europe by volunteering to help

answer

Republicans, Spanish Civil War

question

Conflicts between characters with traditional Southern values and the aggressive, rapidly-changing world of modern America forms one of the major themes in

answer

Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

question

Which Eugene O'Neill play is an autobiographical account of his Irish-American family?

answer

Long Day's Journey into Night

question

Sinclair Lewis's tale of a middle class businessman's discontent is entitled

answer

Babbitt

question

Which of the following novels traces the development of a young Jewish boy growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression?

answer

The Adventures of Augie March

question

In which novel are African-American boys cruelly tormented in the "Battle Royal"?

answer

Invisible Man

question

The Beat poet who revolutionized American poetry with Howl was

answer

Allen Ginsberg

question

In his work Fire Next Time, James Baldwin argues for

answer

end to separation between the races

question

In which of the following novels does the protagonist Tyrone Slothrop undergo physiological conditioning to be able to detect things others cannot?

answer

Nobody Knows My Name

question

Which author is known as "the Chekhov of the Suburbs" for his writings about the social mores and emotional yearnings of upper-middle class suburban families?

answer

John Cheever

question

Holden Caulfield is the creation of which author?

answer

J. D. Salinger

question

Which Toni Morrison novel tells of Milkman Dead's search for identity?

answer

Song of Solomon

question

Which author wrote Grendel, a retelling of the Old English epic Beowulf from the monster's point of view?

answer

John Gardner

question

Harry Angstrom is the protagonist of which of the following works?

answer

Rabbit Run

question

Which author wrote the semi-autobiographical Pnin about an ineffectual professor?

answer

Vladimir Nabokov

question

John Berryman Anne Sexton Sylvia Plath Theodore Roethke

answer

known for their work after World War II

question

Which of the following authors wrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep?

answer

William Faulkner

question

Hester Prynne commits the sin of

answer

adultery

question

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

answer

Jonathan Edwards

question

The authors of The Federalist Papers hoped to increase

answer

popular support for the proposed Constitution

question

Which author described the migration of the Joad family to California during the Great Depression?

answer

John Steinbeck

question

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

answer

Walden, Thoreau

question

Which of the following poets was influenced by the "confessional" style of her teacher Robert Lowell?

answer

Sylvia Plath

question

Which of the following books was poorly received because of its frank discussion of female sexuality?

answer

The Awakening

question

Which of the following authors is known for his/her character portraits contrasting Americans and Europeans?

answer

Edith Wharton

question

Which of the following is the setting for Arthur Miller's The Crucible?

answer

Salem

question

Which of the following poets was a member of the "Midwestern" or "Chicago School" that challenged East Coast dominance of poetry prior to World War I?

answer

Carl Sandburg

question

This Side of Paradise was the first novel of

answer

F. Scott Fitzgerald

question

Who wrote these novels? The Sun Also Rises A Farewell to Arms For Whom the Bell Tolls Green Hills of Africa

answer

Ernest Hemingway

question

Which novel follows an American volunteer fighting for the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil war?

answer

For Whom the Bell Tolls

question

The poem In Just was written by

answer

e. e. cummings

question

These poems were written by "The Road Not Taken" "Mending Wall" "Home Burial" "After Apple-Picking"

answer

Robert Frost

question

Why should Tamenund stay? The pale faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red men has not yet come again. My day has been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong; and yet, before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior of the wise race of the Mohicans. What is Tamenund's attitude?

answer

resignation

question

Which author used the literary conceit of time travel to lampoon religion and society?

answer

Mark Twain

question

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.

answer

Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis

question

Through hard work, anyone can succeed in America.

answer

Horatio Alger Myth

question

At the conclusion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim discovers that

answer

mistress had already set him free

question

Which of the following is a semi-autobiographical account of early twentieth-century life in the American South?

answer

Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

question

The main character of All the King's Men is undone when

answer

secret affair

question

The following were critical of: Mark Twain Frederick Douglass W. E. B. DuBois Toni Morrison

answer

slavery

question

wrote the three books of the USA trilogy: The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money.

answer

John Dos Passos

question

Author of this was probably a? We want freedom from the white man rather than to be integrated. We don't want any part of the establishment, we want to be free to raise our children in our religion, in our ways, to be able to hunt and fish and live in peace. We don't want power, we don't want to be congressmen, or bankers....we want to be ourselves. We want to have our heritage, because we are the owners of this land and because we belong here. The white man says there is freedom and justice for all. We have had "freedom and justice," and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not forget this.

answer

Native American

question

What colonial governor of Rhode Island was author of A Plea for Religious Liberty ?

answer

Roger Williams

question

If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let s so persevere That when we live no more, we may live ever. Who's the author?

answer

Anne Bradstreet

question

The first published book of American poetry

answer

Anne Bradstreet's Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America

question

The opening section of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury uses which narrative style?

answer

stream of consciousness

question

What business makes the principal character of The Rise of Silas Lapham wealthy?

answer

paint

question

Which of the following authors is known for her stories of New England?

answer

Sarah Orne Jewett

question

Which book co-authored by Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain attacked sentimental American myths of financial success?

answer

The Gilded Age

question

Which of the following poets was the author of Renascence and Other Poems?

answer

Edna St. Vincent Millay

question

Richard Wright's Native Son ends with the principal character Bigger Thomas

answer

sentenced to death

question

All told from the perspective of a ? To Kill a Mockingbird Black Boy Catcher in the Rye The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

answer

child

question

American journalists or novelists who exposed corruption in big business and government during the progressive era were known as

answer

muckrakers

question

Which of the following 19th century authors wrote the critical piece titled "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"?

answer

Mark Twain

question

The Last of the Mohicans takes place during which war?

answer

French and Indian War

question

Which of the following is an important theme in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea?

answer

honor of struggle, defeat, and death

question

Which of the following was hailed by Alfred Kazin as "the most profound novel of Jewish life by an American"?

answer

Call it Sleep

question

A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master.

answer

Edgar Allan Poe

question

chronicles several decades of the African American experience in a thematically connected series of plays?

answer

August Wilson

question

The beautiful, delicate glass animals in Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie are symbolic of

answer

Laura

question

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive, also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a similar period.

answer

Nathaniel Hawthorne

question

Walt Whitman was most influenced by which of the following American writers?

answer

Ralph Waldo Emerson

question

organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, launched the women's rights movement in the United States

answer

Seneca Falls Convention

question

Which of the following authors is considered a member of the American Romantic movement?

answer

Edgar Allan Poe

question

Queequeg, Peleg, and Starbuck are characters from the writings of which of the following authors?

answer

Herman Melville

question

Which author based his story of four men stranded in a dinghy on his own experience during an ill-fated trip to Cuba?

answer

Stephen Crane

question

Which sentence best describes the poetry of William Carlos Williams?

answer

concrete images from everyday life

question

How does Mademoiselle Reisz influence Edna in Kate Chopin's The Awakening?

answer

inspires Edna toward self-sufficiency

question

They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

answer

The Harlem Renaissance

question

The principal characters of Melville's Typee lived among

answer

cannibals and missionaries

question

Which of the following writers is most closely associated with Italian Fascism?

answer

Ezra Pound

question

The "central observing consciousness" of Henry James' Daisy Miller is

answer

Winterbourne

question

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," a family vacation to Florida ends when the family is

answer

killed by escaped convicts

question

Which of the following authors wrote Go Tell It on the Mountain based in part on his or her experience as a teenage preacher?

answer

James Baldwin

question

Which of the following authors was heavily influenced by reading of T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer?

answer

Theodore Dreiser

question

The principal character of John Barth's The Floating Opera is best described as a

answer

nihilist

question

The principal character in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is

answer

Oedipa

question

Which of the following authors recorded the life and times of the "lost generation" in the book Exile's Return?

answer

Malcolm Cowley

question

Which of the following was most important in ending the Romantic era in American literature?

answer

the Civil War

question

Upon a Spider Catching a Fly line Thou sorrow, venom elf. Is this thy play, To spin a web out of thyself To catch a fly? For why? I saw a pettish wasp Fall foul therein, Whom yet thy whorl pins did not clasp Lest he should fling His sting.

answer

Edward Taylor

question

a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

answer

"The Song of Hiawatha"

question

work by Washington Irving first established him as a Romantic author

answer

The Sketch Book

question

These writers all worked as a ? Margaret Fuller Ernest Hemingway Louisa May Alcott John Dos Passos

answer

journalist

question

Which of the following was known as a revivalist and "theologian of the heart"?

answer

Jonathan Edwards

question

Rebecca Harding Davis' writing is considered by most critics to be

answer

Realistic

question

Which of the following authors wrote several novels containing the unusual combination of realism and elements from fairy tales?

answer

Mark Twain

question

Which of the following poets described his/her work as applying the cubist technique of Pablo Picasso to writing?

answer

Gertrude Stein

question

Which of the following poems draws inspiration from Dante's Inferno?

answer

The Waste Land

question

Wrote The Waste Land

answer

T. S. Eliot

question

Which of the following authors is most known for experimenting with viewpoint and voice?

answer

William Faulkner

question

In which story of Edgar Allan Poe is the unfortunate Fortunato walled up inside an underground crypt?

answer

Cask of Amontillado

question

The race relations philosophy of which African American is implicitly criticized in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man?

answer

Booker T. Washington

question

For the first time, she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lesson the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.

answer

her sexuality

question

Willy Loman's son Biff is unable to keep a job because he

answer

immature and steals from his employers

question

Which of the following is the title of Saul Bellow's novel in which a middle-aged millionaire is driven to Africa by his unsatisfied ambitions?

answer

Henderson the Rain King

question

Which woman was a leader of the Settlement House movement and author of Twenty Years at Hull House?

answer

Jane Addams

question

Which of the following novels describes urban life during turn-of-the-century America without moralizing about the failures of its major characters?

answer

Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser

question

Which of the following authors was most influenced by 19th-century ideas of Social Darwinism?

answer

Jack London

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