1) Literary divisions are not always exact, but we draw them because they are often convenient. The majority of English literary periods are named after:

a)The leading characteristic of the age
b)Monarchs or political events
c)The primary author of the age
d)The language of the age

2)Which period of literature came first?

a)Regency
b)Victorian
c)Romantic
d)Restoration

3)In what language did Shakespeare write?

a)Middle English
b)German
c)Old English
d)Modern English


4)Jane Austen wrote during this period.

a)Restoration
b)Victorian
c)Middle English
d)Regency



5)Which work was published first?

a)Blake’s "Songs of Innocence"
b)Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein"
c)Lord Byron’s "Don Juan"
d)Sir Walter Scott’s "Ivanhoe"

6)Which of the following works was written before the all-important Battle of Hastings?

a)Beowulf
b)Canterbury Tales
c)The Domesday Book
d)Sons and Lovers


7)Who wrote first?

a)George Eliot
b)Christopher Marlowe
c)Howard, Earl of Surrey
d)William Shakespeare

8)Which work was completed last?

a)John Milton's "Paradise Lost"
b)George Herbert's "The Temple"
c)William Shakespeare's "Tempest"
d)Ben Jonson's "Volpone"

9)One of these men did NOT write during the Restoration period. Who?

a)John Milton
b)Thomas Otway
c)Sir Walter Scott
d)John Dryden


10)The Bronte sisters wrote during this period.

a)Regency
b)Restoration
c)Romantic
d)Victorian


11)Which of the following poets wrote during the Victorian period but was not published until the 20th century?

a)Christina Rossetti
b)Gerard Manley Hopkins
c)Elizabeth Barret Browning
d)Ted Hughes

12)This work was NOT originally published in the 20th Century.

a)Henry James's "The Ambassadors"
b)Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"
c)E.M. Forster's "A Room With A View"
d)Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway"

13)Which poet did NOT write during the 16th century?

a)John Skelton
b)William Shakespeare
c)Sir Thomas Wyatt
d)Thomas Carew

14)Historical events often influence literature. Which of the following did NOT occur during the Restoration period?

a)Charles II was restored to the throne
b)The French Revolution
c)The Great Fire of London
d)The Exclusion Bill Crisis

15)He was not a Renaissance writer.

a)William Shakespeare
b)Sir Philip Sidney
c)Christopher Marlowe
d)Sir Thomas Malory

16)Which of the following literary sub-periods does NOT fall under the Neoclassical Period?

a)The Restoration
b)Jacobean Age
c)The Augustan Age
d)The Age of Sensibility


17)Which of the following periods of English literature came last?

a)The Elizabethan Age
b)The Commonwealth Period
c)The Jacobean Age
d)The Middle English Period

18)This work was written before the other three choices.

a)Bede's "An Ecclesiastical History of the English People"
b)Julian of Norwhich's "Book of Showings"
c)Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"
d)Sir Thomas More's "Utopia"


19)Which of the following writers would be an appropriate subject for a class on “The Literature of the British Empire”?

a)Rudyard Kipling
b)Edward Fitzgerald
c)Charlotte Bronte
d)Any of these

20)World War I affected the writing of many authors. Which of the following poets would not have been touched by that event?

a)T.S. Eliot
b)Siegfried Sassoon
c)Wilfred Owen
d)Oscar Wilde

21)The period of maturation, intellectual growth and social graces during the Renaissance is called the:


22)The most popular French playwright, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, is known as:
A) Caleron
B) Corneille
C) Couperin
D) Moliere


23)The first Englishwoman to earn her living as a playwright was:
A) Nell Gwynn
B) Aphra Behn
C) Lady Teazle
D) Ann Hathaway



1)b
2)d
3)d---*(As ancient as his wording may seem to our contemporary ears, Shakespeare wrote in what is known as Modern English. Chaucer wrote in Middle English, and Old English (in which "Beowulf" was written) is for all practical purposes a foreign language. )
4)d--"The Regency" refers to the period when the Prince of Wales served as regent to George III, after the King had been declared incurably insane in 1811. Jane Austen is the most famous writer of this period. The period overlaps in time somewhat with the Romantic Period, but Jane Austen is not generally considered a Romantic.
5)a
6)a
7)c
8)a
9)c
10)d
11)b
12)b
13)d
14)b
15)d
16)b
17)b
18)a
19)d
20)d
21)d
22)d
23)b