UPHESC Assistant Professor English 2025 PYQs

Concept: In Chaucer's General Prologue the Knight travels with his son the Squire and one servant, the Yeoman.

1. The Knight is the 'verray, parfit gentil knyght'.
2. "With hym ther was his sone, a yong Squier" – the Squire is the Knight's son.
3. "A Yeman hadde he, and servantz namo" – the Yeoman is the Knight's only attendant.

Short trick: Knight → Squire (son) → Yeoman (servant): Father, son, attendant.

Concept: Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville is the first English tragedy in blank verse.

1. Its 1570 edition was titled The Tragedie of Ferrex and Porrex.
2. Ferrex and Porrex are the two sons of King Gorboduc who divides his kingdom between them.
3. 'Senecan tragedy' is its type, not its title; the other two options are invented.

Short trick: Gorboduc's two sons = Ferrex & Porrex = the alternative title.

Concept: The line is Faustus's address to the spirit of Helen of Troy in Act V, Scene i of Doctor Faustus.

1. Mephistopheles conjures Helen; Faustus says: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"
2. He continues: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss."
3. Tamburlaine, Dido and Edward II have no such Helen scene.

Short trick: Helen + kiss + thousand ships = Faustus.

Concept: In Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess's child by Alec d'Urberville is baptised by her as 'Sorrow'.

1. The sickly baby is dying; Tess herself baptises him at night and names him Sorrow (from Genesis).
2. He dies in infancy and is buried in a neglected corner of the churchyard.
3. The name sums up Phase the Second, 'Maiden No More'.

Short trick: Tess's baby = 'Sorrow, the Undesired'.

Concept: Each line is a famous line from a Romantic or Modernist poem.

1. a. "Surely some revelation is at hand" – Yeats, The Second Coming (iii).
2. b. "Who are these coming to the sacrifice?" – Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn (i).
3. c. "If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear" – Shelley, Ode to the West Wind (ii).
4. d. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" – Eliot, The Waste Land (iv).

Short trick: Revelation → Second Coming; sacrifice → Urn's procession; dead leaf → West Wind; dust → Waste Land.

Concept: Ramanujan published three volumes in his lifetime; the fourth appeared posthumously.

1. The Striders (1966) → Relations (1971) → Second Sight (1986).
2. The Black Hen was published posthumously in Collected Poems (1995) – his last volume.
3. Collected Poems (1995) won the Sahitya Akademi Award.

Short trick: S-R-S-B: Striders, Relations, Second Sight, Black Hen (last).

Concept: A metrical foot is named by its pattern of stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables.

1. Spondee = / / (two stresses), e.g. 'heartbreak'.
2. Anapest = x x /; Trochee = / x; Dactyl = / x x.
3. Only the spondee has two stressed syllables.

Short trick: Spondee – 'Strong-Strong'.

Concept: Harold Bloom's A Map of Misreading (1975) is the sequel to The Anxiety of Influence (1973).

1. It argues that strong poets 'misread' (misprision) their precursors to create space for themselves.
2. Hartman (Yale critic) wrote Criticism in the Wilderness; Kermode wrote The Sense of an Ending; Drakakis edited Alternative Shakespeares.

Short trick: Bloom: Anxiety of Influence → Map of Misreading.

Concept: The words come from Raja Rao's Foreword to Kanthapura (1938).

1. In it he discusses conveying 'in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own'.
2. He says English is the language of our intellectual make-up but not of our emotional make-up, and that our style must be distinctively Indian.

Short trick: Kanthapura Foreword = manifesto of Indian English → Raja Rao.

Concept: Four American poems: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and Frost.

1. a. 'They know not well the subtle ways I keep' – Emerson, Brahma (iii).
2. b. 'A worship new I sing… O soul' – Whitman, Passage to India (ii).
3. c. 'To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need' – Dickinson, Success is Counted Sweetest (i).
4. d. 'Spring is the mischief in me… good neighbors' – Frost, Mending Wall (iv).

Short trick: Brahma speaks of 'ways I keep'; Whitman's engineers; Dickinson's nectar; Frost's neighbours.

Concept: Bilabial sounds are made with both lips: /p/, /b/, /m/ (and /w/ labial-velar).

1. /p/ – voiceless bilabial plosive.
2. /t/, /d/ – alveolar plosives.
3. /f/ – labiodental fricative (lower lip + upper teeth).

Short trick: Bi-labial = two lips: p, b, m.

Concept: 'Dissociation of sensibility' appears in Eliot's 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921).

1. Eliot says after Donne and the Metaphysicals, 'a dissociation of sensibility set in' – thought and feeling split apart.
2. 'Objective correlative' is in 'Hamlet and His Problems' (1919).
3. 'The Perfect Critic' and 'The Function of Criticism' deal with the critic's role.

Short trick: Metaphysical poets had unified sensibility → after them, dissociation.

Concept: Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry appeared in 1765.

1. It collected old ballads (e.g. 'Chevy Chase', 'Sir Patrick Spens').
2. It strongly influenced the Romantic revival – Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott acknowledged it.

Short trick: Percy's Reliques 1765 – same decade as Ossian (1760s).

Concept: In Scene V (Rheims Cathedral) the Archbishop rebukes Joan's pride after the coronation.

1. The Archbishop tells Joan she is guilty of the sin of pride: "The old Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris."
2. Charles merely complains that Joan thinks she knows better than everyone.
3. Joan would not accuse herself of hubris.

Short trick: Hubris lecture = churchman (Archbishop).

Concept: 'Derelict' is the last chapter of Sons and Lovers.

1. After his mother's death (chapter 'The Release'), Paul is left derelict and drifting.
2. At the end he turns away from darkness 'towards the faintly humming, glowing town' – the final stage of his journey.
3. 'The Death of William' is an early chapter (Part I); 'The Triumph of Clara' is not a chapter title.

Short trick: Last chapter = Derelict (after The Release).

Concept: Dates: Lyrical Ballads 1798; Biographia Literaria 1817; Culture and Anarchy 1869; The Study of Poetry 1880.

1. IV (1798) → II (1817) → I (1869) → III (1880).
2. Option C wrongly puts The Study of Poetry before Culture and Anarchy.

Short trick: Romantics first (Wordsworth, Coleridge), then Arnold's prose before his 1880 essay.

Concept: Each rasa has a presiding deity and colour; Shanta rasa (sthayi bhava: nirveda/shama) is white and presided over by Vishnu (Narayana).

1. Shringara – shyama (dark) – Vishnu; Raudra – red – Rudra; Bhayanaka – black – Kala.
2. Shanta, added by later theorists (Udbhata, Abhinavagupta), is described as white like the kunda flower/moon, with Narayana-Vishnu as deity.
3. Indra is the deity of Vira; Brahma of Adbhuta.

Short trick: Shanta = peace = white, Vishnu (preserver, calm).

Concept: The sentence opens Chapter 4 ('Communication and the Artist') of I. A. Richards's Principles of Literary Criticism (1924).

1. Richards built criticism on psychology: value (organisation of impulses) and communication.
2. Leavis, Eliot and Arnold did not formulate criticism in these two 'pillars'.

Short trick: Richards = value + communication (+ emotive vs referential language).

Concept: Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry… in 1757.

1. Burke links the sublime with terror, obscurity, vastness and power, and beauty with smallness and smoothness.
2. It influenced Kant and Gothic/Romantic aesthetics.

Short trick: Burke 1757: Sublime = terror; Beautiful = love.

Concept: Caliban in The Tempest is generally read as an anagram of 'canibal' (cannibal).

1. C-A-L-I-B-A-N ↔ C-A-N-I-B-A-L.
2. It echoes Montaigne's essay 'Of Cannibals', a known source of the play.
3. Mercutio, Falstaff and Hamlet are not anagrams.

Short trick: Caliban ↔ Canibal.