৫১তম বিসিএস ফাইনাল মডেল টেস্ট ও রিভিশন

Irony:
A statement or a situation or an action that actually means the opposite of its surface meaning.

The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice is an example of irony:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Source: An ABC of English Literature - Dr. M Mofizar Rahman

''Desdemona'' is a play by Toni Morrison. It was first produced in Vienna in May 2011.
The title character of the play is Desdemona, the wife of the title character in Shakespeare's Othello.
Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970.
Her other novels are -
- Sula
- Song of Solomon
- Tar Baby
- A Mercy etc
Source: Britannica.com

The Neoclassical Period (1660-1785):
The Neoclassical Age comprises three shorter ages:
The Restoration Period (1660-1700)
The Augustan Age (1702-1745)
The Age of Sensibility (1745-1785)
Writer of Neoclassical Period imitated style of ancient Greek and Roman writers. Though they imitated the Greek and Roman tradition but lacked the originality of the writers of that period.
Source: An ABC of English Literature - Dr M Mofizar Rahman

Cristopher Marlowe was the greatest dramatist before Shakespeare.
- Christopher Marlowe, (baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.—died May 30, 1593, Deptford, near London), Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse. 

Some of Marlowe's literary works:
- Doctor Faustus,
- The Jew of Malta,
- Tamburlaine the Great

Source: Britannica.com

Charles Dickens is considered the greatest English novelist of the Victorian era.

His famous novels:
- David Copperfield,
- A Tale of Two Cities,
- The Battle of Life,
- Great Expectations,
- Our Mutual Friend,
- Oliver Twist,
- The Christmas Carol,
- The Bleak House,
- The Old Curiosity Shop,
- The Pickwick Papers,
- Hard Times,
- The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Source: Live MCQ Lecture, and Britannica.

T.S. Eliot was a groundbreaking 20th-century poet who is known widely for his work 'The Waste Land.'
- T.S. Eliot published his first poetic masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1915.
- In 1921, he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from exhaustion.
- The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the genre and became one of the most talked about poems in literary history.
- For his lifetime of poetic innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Part of the ex-pat community of the 1920s, he spent most of his life in Europe, dying in London, England, in 1965.

Source: https://www.biography.com/

John Bunyan is the powerful writer of the Puritan Period.
- He is famous for his allegory.
- His famous allegory is The Pilgrim's Progress.

- Absalom and Achitophel written by John Dryden,
- For Whom The Bell Tolls -- poem written by John Donne and novel written by Ernest Hemingway.
- To His Coy Mistress written by Andrew Marvel.

Source: An ABC of English Literature, Dr. M Mofizar Rahman and Live MCQ Lecture.

W. H. Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) is one of his most celebrated poems.
It enjoys a critical reputation as the finest poetic elegy written in English in the twentieth century, a work that boldly recast the conventions of formal elegiac verse for a disenchanted modern age.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats
W. H. Auden

"He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day."

Source: Poetryfoundation

Subjectivity:
A mode of expression in which information about the writer's personal life finds a place. In this type of writing, the writer's likes and dislikes are given importance. 
Objectivity:
A mode of expression in which the writer’s personal life remains absent from his writing. Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and T.S. Eliot are some of the famous objective writers.
No information about their lives or about their likes and dislikes is found in their great works. It is the opposite of subjectivity.

Source: An ABC of English Literature, Dr. M Mofizar Rahman.

William Faulkner, in full William Cuthbert Faulkner, original surname Falkner, (born September 25, 1897, New Albany, Mississippi, U.S.—died July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Mississippi), American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.

- Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Samuel Butler were British novelists.

Source: Britannica

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Major works:
- Prometheus Unbound (1820),
- Adonais (1821),
- A Defense of poetry (1820),
- Ode to the West Wind,
- To a skylark,
- The Revolt of Islam,
- Alastor, Ozymandias,
- Queen Mab,
- The cloud.

George Herbert was a religious poet.
His famous poems are:
- The Easter Wings,
- The Temple,
- On the Progress of Soul.

Source: Live MCQ lecture and Britannica.

Volpone, in full Volpone; or, The Fox, comedy in five acts by Ben Jonson, performed about 1605/06 and published in 1607. Volpone (“Fox”), a wealthy Venetian without heirs, devises a scheme to become wealthier by playing on people’s greed.

• Ben Jonson was famous for 'Comedy of Humors'.
• His famous plays:
- Volpone,
- Every Man Out of His Humour,
- Every Man in His Humour,
- The Silent Woman,
- The Alchemist,
- The Magnetic Lady,
- The Devil is an Ass etc.
Source: An ABC of English Literature, Dr. M Mofizar Rahman and Live MCQ Lecture and Live MCQ lecture, Britannica.

Doctor Faustus, in full The Tragicall History of D. Faustus, tragedy in five acts play by Christopher Marlowe, published in 1604 but first performed a decade or so earlier. 

Quotes of Dr. Faustus:
 - Hell is just a frame of mind.
 - He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.
 - Fools that will laugh on earth, most weep in hell.
Source: Britannica

William Shakespeare was an English dramatist and poet of the sixteenth century.
• He is known mostly for his plays.
• He was born on 23 April, 1564 AD and died on 23 April, 1616 AD.
• He is often called the bard of Avon.
• He wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets.
• His famous Tragedies:
- Hamlet,
- Macbeth,
- Othello,
- King Lear,
- Julius Caesar,
- Romeo and Juliet,
- Antony and Cleopatra,
- Titus Andronicus,
- Timon of Athens.
• His famous comedies:
- As You Like It,
-The Comedy of Errors,
- Twelfth Night,
- The Taming of The Shrew,
- Mid Summer Night's Dream,
- The Tempest,
- The Two Gentleman of Verona,
- The Merry Wives of Windsor,
- The Winter's Tale,
- Cymbeline,
- Pericles, Prince of Tyre,
- The Two Nobel Kinsman,
- Much Ado About Nothing,
- Love's Labours Lost.
Source: An ABC of English Literature, Dr. M Mofizar Rahman and Encyclopedia of Britannica.

The Augustan Age (1702-1745):
- This age is called the Augustan Age because the writers of this period imitated the style and elegance of the writers who wrote in Italy during the reign of Emperor Augustus (27 B.C.-14 A.D).
- This span of time is also called the Age of Pope because Alexander Pope was the best-known poet of the time.
- During these years England was ruled by Queen Anne (1702-14), George I (1714-27) and George II (1727-60).
Major Writers of the period:
- Daniel Defoe
- Jonathan Swift
- Alexander Pope
- Henry Fielding

John Milton was a writer of the Restoration Period.

Source: An ABC of English Literature - Dr M Mofizar Rahman

A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens that was first published in 1859.
- The story is set in the late 18th century against the background of the French Revolution.
Some important characters from this novel -
- Charles Darnay,
- Sydney Carton,
- Doctor Manette,
- Lucie Manette,
- Monsieur Defarge etc.
Source: Britannica.com

Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published over a six-year period. 
- The Four Quartets' individual quartets, in the order of their composition as well as their placement in the sequence, are “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding.”

“Little Gidding” was the last of the Quartets to be written. It appeared in print in 1942; in 1943, the four pieces were collected and published together.
“Little Gidding,” named after a 17th-century Anglican monastery renowned for its devotion, is the place where the problems of time and human fallibility are more or less resolved.
The first section describes a sunny winter’s day, where everything is dead yet blazing with the sun’s fire.
The poem considers those who have come to the monastery, who come only “to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.”

Source: Britannica and Sparknotes

H.G. Wells(1866-1946):
- In full Herbert George Wells.
- English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine and The  War of the Worlds and such comic novels as Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly.
- His other science fiction novels: The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The    First Men in the Moon (1901), and The Food of the Gods (1904).
- He also wrote many short stories, which were collected in The Stolen Bacillus (1895), The Plattner Story (1897), and Tales of Space and Time (1899).

Source: Live MCQ Lecture and Encyclopaedia Britannica

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by the English author Mary Anne Evans, who wrote as George Eliot.
- Middlemarch is a great Victorian novel, but like several other great Victorian novels (Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations) it is set in an earlier age.
- It was first published, in installments, between 1871 and 1872, but it opens in 1829.
- Middlemarch won this BBC Culture poll by a landslide: 42% of the critics polled included it in their lists.

Pygmalion, romance in five acts by George Bernard Shaw, was produced in Germany in 1913 in Vienna.
- It was performed in England in 1914, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle.
- The play is a humane comedy about love and the English class system.

Source: Britannica

The Dunciad, poem by Alexander Pope, first published anonymously in three books in 1728; by 1743, when it appeared in its final form, it had grown to four books. Written largely in iambic pentameter, the poem is a masterpiece of mock-heroic verse.

- Alexander Pope is called Mock-Heroic Poet.
- His famous epic is The Rape of the Lock.
- His notable works:
• An Essay on Criticism,
• The Dunciad,
• The Imitation of Horace,
• An Essay on Man,
• Letter to Gay.
Source: An ABC of English Literature, Dr. M Mofizar Rahman and Encyclopedia of Britannica.

Dark comedy is a kind of drama which portrays the meaninglessness of human existence. This kind of comedy laughs at human predicaments which hide a bitter frustration.
Ex: Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Winter’s Tale etc.

- 'As you like it’ is a Romantic comedy.

Source: An ABC of english Literature, Dr. M Mofizur Rahman

English Literature Periods:
450 - 1066 :- The Old English Period
1066 - 1500 :- The Middle English Period
1500 - 1660 :- The Renaissance Period
1660 - 1785 :- The Neoclassical Period
1798 - 1832 :- Romantic Period
1832 - 1901 :- Victorian Period

- Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë's only novel. Written between October 1845 and June 1846.
- Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë that was published in 1847.
- Vanity Fair, a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, was published serially in monthly installments from 1847 to 1848.

Gulliver’s Travels, original title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, four-part satirical work by Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, published anonymously in 1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. 

Source: An ABC of English Literature - Dr M Mofizar Rahman, Britannica.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is considered by many to be both the playwright’s masterpiece and a cornerstone of contemporary American drama. ----- Subtitled Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem, the play was first produced in 1949 and struck an immediate, emotional chord with audiences.
- The work garnered numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and enjoyed a lengthy run (742 performances) on Broadway.
- In the decades following its premiere, Death of Salesman has become one of the most performed and adapted plays in American theatrical history. 

Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy.
Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens.
The Rainbow is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence

Source: Britannica

"To Autumn" is a poem by English Romantic poet John Keats.

The main themes in "To Autumn" are the power of nature, the passage of time, and the consolation of beauty.

The power of nature: The poem expresses reverence and awe for the great changes wrought by nature as autumn brings its riches to the landscape.
The passage of time: The stages of autumn are illustrates by the poem's three stanzas, from ripening to harvesting to the turn towards winter.
The consolation of beauty: Keats's lines celebrate the great beauty of autumn even as they evoke a somber sensibility.

John Keats, the poet of beauty, was a famous poet of the Romantic period.
His major works are-
- ‘Endymion’
- ‘Hyperion’
- ‘Ode to Autumn’
- ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
- ‘Ode on Melancholy’
- ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
- ‘To Lord Byron’
Source: classicalpoets.org

Ulysses, novel by Irish writer James Joyce, first published in book form in 1922.
- Stylistically dense and exhilarating, it is generally regarded as a masterpiece and has been the subject of numerous volumes of commentary and analysis. 
- The novel is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey.

Source: Britannica

William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy that follows the courtships and marriages of two sisters. Written sometime between 1590 and 1594, it was published in Shakespeare’s First Folio edition of works in 1623.

The play describes the volatile courtship between the shrewish Katharina (Kate) and the canny Petruchio, who is determined to subdue Katharina’s legendary temper and win her dowry.

The main story is offered as a play within a play; the frame plot consists of an initial two-scene “induction” in which a whimsical lord decides to play a practical joke on a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, by inducing him to believe that he is in fact a nobleman who has suffered from amnesia and is only now awaking from it.

Source: Britannica

Ode, ceremonious poem on an occasion of public or private dignity in which personal emotion and general meditation are united.
The Greek word ōdē, which has been accepted in most modern European languages, meant a choric song, usually accompanied by a dance.

Source: Britannica

War and Peace, historical novel by Leo Tolstoy, originally published as Voyna i mir in 1865–69.
This panoramic study of early 19th-century Russian society, noted for its mastery of realistic detail and variety of psychological analysis, is generally regarded as a masterwork of Russian literature and one of the world’s greatest novels.

Source: Britannica

• Robert Frost is an American National poet.
• His famous poems:
- Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening,
- Nothing Gold Can Stay,
- After Apple-Picking,
- Road Not Taken,
- Mending Wall,
- Christmas Trees,
- Home Burial,
- A Way Out (one act play) etc.


Source: Live MCQ Lecture and Encyclopedia of Britannica.

Negative capability, a writer's ability, “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” according to English poet John Keats, who first used the term in an 1817 letter.
Source:  Britannica

Lake poet, any of the English poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who lived in the English Lake District of Cumberland and Westmorland (now Cumbria) at the beginning of the 19th century.
Source: Britannica.

Shakespeare who had started writing in the Elizabethan Period wrote twelve serious plays in Jacobean period. Those plays are:
1. Measure for Measure (1604)
2. Othello (1604)
3. Macbeth (1605)
4. King Lear (1605)
5. Antony and Cleopatra (1606)
6. Coriolanus (1606)
7 Timon of Athens (unfinished-1608)
8. Pericles (in part-1608)
9. Cymbeline (1609)
10. The Winter's Tale
11. The Tempest (1611)
12. Henry VIII (in part-1613)
(Dr M Mofizur Rahman)

The Indian Emperour, or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, being the Sequel of The Indian Queen is an English Restoration era stage play, a heroic drama written by John Dryden that was first performed in the Spring of 1665.
The play has been considered a defining work in the subgenre of heroic drama, in which "rhymed heroic tragedy comes into full being.

Source: Amazon.com

To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf.
- The novel centers on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

Top 10 Best Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway:
- The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)
- A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1933)
- Hills Like White Elephants (1927)
- Soldier's Home (1925)
- Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1936)
- The Capital of the World (1936)
- Cat in the Rain (1925)
- A Day's Wait (1933)

To Kill a Mockingbird, novel by American author Harper Lee, published in 1960.
- Enormously popular, it was translated into some 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide,
  and is one of the most-assigned novels in American schools.
- In 1961 it won a Pulitzer Prize.
- The novel was praised for its sensitive treatment of a child’s awakening to racism and prejudice in the American South.

Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, without diversions or subplots.

The tragedy of Macbeth, a play in five acts by William Shakespeare, portrays the rise and fall of a Scottish nobleman whose blind ambition leads him to commit several murders in order to become king. 

Source: Britannica

Henry James was one of the most prolific writers of the 19th century.
His most famous works include:
- The Portrait of a Lady (1881),
- The Bostonians (1886),
- The Ambassadors (1903).

Many of his tales, including:
- The Figure in the Carpet (1896) and The Turn of the Screw (1898), are still widely read.

Source: Britannica

Alexandre Dumas, père, (born July 24, 1802, Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, France—died December 5, 1870, Puys, near Dieppe), one of the most prolific and most popular French authors of the 19th century.
- Without ever attaining indisputable literary merit, Dumas succeeded in gaining a great reputation first as a dramatist and then as a historical novelist,
- especially for such works as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. 

Source: Britannica

John Masefield(1878-1967):
-He is a British poet.
- He is Best known for his poems of the sea, ‘Salt-Water Ballads’ (1902, including “Sea Fever” and “Cargoes”), and for his long narrative poems, such as ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ (1911).
His other notable works: Dauber, Reynard the Fox.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Paradise Lost: Book  1 (1674 version)
BY JOHN MILTON

"Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men."

এটি John Milton এর একটি Epic.

তার আরেকটি বিখ্যাত epic - Paradis Regained.

• William Somerset Maugham is an English Novelist, Playwright and Story writer.
• His famous short stories:
- The Ant and the Grasshopper,
- The Luncheon.
• His famous Novels:
- Of Human Bondage,
- The Sacred Flames,
- The Razor's Edge,
- Cakes and Ale,
- The Musician,
- The Moon and Sixpence,
- Lady Frederick.

- Jane Austen is an English novelist.
- Ernest Hemingway, American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
- Thomas Kyd is an English dramatist.

Source: Live MCQ Lecture and An ABC of English Literature, Britannica

Gabriel García Márquez won Nobel Prize in 1982.
Bertrand Russell won Nobel Prize in 1950.
Ernest Hemingway won Nobel prize in 1954.

E. M. Forster was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 13 different years but he did not win one.

Source: Nobel Prize website

The Old Man and the Sea, a short heroic novel by Ernest Hemingway, was published in 1952 and awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
- It was his last major work of fiction.
- The story centers on an aging fisherman who engages in an epic battle to catch a giant marlin.

Source: Britannica

Arms and the Man, a romantic comedy in three acts by George Bernard Shaw, was produced in 1894 and published in 1898.
- The play is set in the Petkoff household in Bulgaria and satirizes romantic ideas concerning war and heroism during the Serbo-Bulgarian War.
- A battle-weary officer, a Swiss mercenary fighting for the Serbian army, takes refuge in Raina Petkoff’s bedchamber, where she agrees to hide him from the authorities.
- In response to his matter-of-fact account of the war, in which he debunks her fiancé Sergius’ heroism, Raina at first ridicules the intruder’s cowardliness but ultimately appreciates his honesty.

Source: Britannica

Alice Munro, original name Alice Ann Laidlaw, (born July 10, 1931, Wingham, Ontario, Canada), Canadian short-story writer who gained international recognition with her exquisitely drawn narratives.
- The Swedish Academy dubbed her a “master of the contemporary short story” when it awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.
- Munro’s work was noted for its precise imagery and narrative style, which is at once lyrical, compelling, economical, and intense, revealing the depth and complexities in the emotional lives of everyday people.

Source: Britannica

Heroic Tragedy:
A kind of drama written in a grand and lofty style to show a disastrous end of a conflict between love and honor or love and duty.
- The Indian Emperor, All for Love written by Dryden, a good example of Heroic Tragedy.

source: An ABC of English Literature - Dr. M Mofizar Rahman

Robert Browning, (born May 7, 1812, London—died Dec. 12, 1889, Venice), a major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture.
Among Browning’s important publications are:
- The Ring and the Book (1868–69),
- Pauline (1833),
- Bells and Pomegranates (1841–46),
- My Last Duchess,
- Men and Women (1855),
- Dramatis Personae (1864), 
- Asolando (1889).

Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman are American Poets.

Source: Britannica and Goodreads

‘Willing suspension of disbelief’ কথাটি S.T. Coleridge তার লেখায় ব্যবহার করেছেন।
- তাঁর মতে, প্রচলিত যুক্তিবোধকে সরিয়ে রেখে কবির বর্ণিত পরাবাস্তব জগতকে উপভোগ করতে হবে।
- আর তাই, অবিশ্বাস এবং যুক্তিবোধ বাদ দিয়ে সেই রচনাটি পাঠকে পড়তে হবে। এটিই ‘willing suspension of disbelief’।

• George Bernard Shaw is the greatest modern dramatist in English literature.
• His famous Plays:
- Arms and the Man,
- Man and Superman,
- Doctor's Dilemma,
- Pygmalion etc.
• Important character of Man and Superman:
- Hector Malone,
- Ann Whitefield,
- Mendoza,
- John Tanner etc.
• Important character of Arms and the Man:
- Captain Bluntschli,
- Louka,
- Nicola,
- Raina Petkoff,
- Catherine Petkoff etc.

Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Jane Eyre all are Novels.

Source: Live MCQ Lecture And Encyclopedia of Britannica.

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939):
- Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century.
- He is famous for his use of “Symbolism and Mysticism”.
- He wrote the preamble of Tagore's “Gitanjali” in 1912, which later got the Nobel prize in 1913.
- W.B Yeats got Nobel prize in 1923.
Major Works:
Poems:
- The Stolen Child
- The wild swans at Coole
- The Tower
- The Winding Stair and Other poems,
- The Resurrection,
- The Second Coming
- The Cat and the Moon
- Byzantium,
- The Lake Isle of Innisfree
- Among School Children
- The Lord of Harts
- falling of leaves
- A prayer for My Daughter
- When You Are Old.
Drama:
- The countess Cathleen
- Cathleen in Houlihan.

In A Station of the Metro" is an Imagist poem by Ezra Pound published in April 1913 in the literary magazine Poetry.

King Lear, tragedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written in 1605–06 and published in a quarto edition in 1608, evidently based on Shakespeare’s unrevised working papers.
Famous Quotes:
- “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
- “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.”
- “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”

Source: Britannica, and Goodreads

The Metamorphosis, a symbolic story by Austrian writer Franz Kafka, was published in German as Die Verwandlung in 1915.
His notable works:
- The Trial,
- The Castle,
- Amerika,
- In the Penal Colony,
- The Metamorphosis,
- Meditation,
- The Judgment,
- Description of a Struggle,
- Letter to Father.

Source: Britannica

Beowulf, heroic poem, the highest achievement of Old English literature and the earliest European vernacular epic.
- The work deals with events of the early 6th century, and, while the date of its composition is uncertain, some scholars believe that it was written in the 8th century.
- Although originally untitled, the poem was later named after the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, whose exploits and character provide its connecting theme.
- There is no evidence of a historical Beowulf, but some characters, sites, and events in the poem can be historically verified.
- The poem did not appear in print until 1815.

Beowulf falls into two parts.
- It opens in Denmark, where King Hrothgar’s splendid mead hall, Heorot, has been ravaged for 12 years by nightly visits from an evil monster, Grendel, who carries off Hrothgar’s warriors and devours them.
- Unexpectedly, young Beowulf, a prince of the Geats of southern Sweden, arrives with a small band of retainers and offers to cleanse Heorot of its monster.

Beowulf belongs metrically, stylistically, and thematically to a heroic tradition grounded in Germanic religion and mythology. It is also part of the broader tradition of heroic poetry.

Source: Britannica

Shakespeare’s play about the doomed romance of two teenagers from feuding families is the most famous love story ever written.
First performed around 1596, Romeo and Juliet has been adapted as a ballet, an opera, the musical West Side Story, and a dozen films.
Characters of William Shakespeare's tragedy 'Romeo and Juliet' are:
- Montague,
- Romeo,
- Juliet,
- Capulet.
- Friar Lawrence
- Mercutio
- Benvolio
Source: Britannica and Sparknotes

Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
       I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
       Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
       Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
       And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
       To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
       And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
       Died Adonais; till the Future dares
       Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"

Walt Whitman(1819-1892): American poet, journalist, and essayist.
His famous works:
- A Passage To India (poem),
- Leaves of Grass,
- Drum-Taps,
- O Captain! My Captain!,
- Songs of Myself etc.

‘Mending Wall’ is a famous poem of Robert Frost.

Source: Britannica.com

- George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950): Irish Born dramatist. Greatest modern dramatist and called the father of Modern English Drama.
- He is famous for his “drama of ideas”. Awarded Nobel prize in 1925.

His Notable Works:
- The philanderer
- Arms and the Man
- Man and Superman
- Doctor’s Dilemma
- Major Barbara
- Heartbreak House
- The Devil’s Discipline
- The Apple cart
- St. Joan
- Pygmalion
- Caesar and Cleopatra
- You Never Can Tell.

Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy by William Shakespeare.

[Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica]

Bacon as The Wisest, The Brightest, And The Meanest of Mankind.
The above sentence is uttered by the great critic as well as the satirist of the Neo-classical age, Alexander Pope in Epistle IV of "His Essay on Man". He is an eminent religious leading figure of the age who tried to correct contemporary society through his knowledge. In this regard, his service is extraordinary. 'The Rape of lock', The Dunciad', 'An Essay on Criticism, "An Essay on Man" etc got a measurable reputation,

"The Future Of Mankind" is an essay written by Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970): 
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, history writer, social critic, and political activist. He was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1950.

His notable Works:
- Mysticism and Logic,
- The Analysis of Mind,
- History of Western philosophy,
- Authority and Individual.
Source: An ABC of English Literature - Dr M Mofizar Rahman, and Britannica.

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674).
• John Milton is a writer of Caroline Age.
•  Paradise Lost was published in 1667
• He is called Epic Poet and also called 'A great master of verse in Puritan Period'.
• His famous Epics:
- Paradise Lost and
- Paradise Regained.
• His famous books:
- Areopagitica (a right to freedom of speech and expression).
- Comus,
- Lycidas,
- Of Education,
Source: An ABC of English Literature, Dr. M Mofizar Rahman and Encyclopedia of Britannica.

David Herbert Lawrence's well known novels:
- Lady Chatterley's Lover,
- Sons and Loves,
- The White Peacock,
- The Rainbow,
- Women in Love,
- A Modern Lover.

So, The author of 'The White Peacock' and 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' is same (David Herbert Lawrence).

Source: Britannica.

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
         A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
         Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
                In word, or sigh, or tear—
O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
         All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,


Dejection: An Ode
BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

William Faulkner is an American novelist and writer. His famous works: The sound and fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, A Rose for Emile, Light in August, The Hamlet (novel), Go Down Moses.
Source: Live MCQ Lecture.

- Robert Browning, Mathew Arnold and Alfred Lord Tennyson are famous English poets of the Victorian Period.
- The poet and novelist Thomas Hardy is perhaps most famous for his powerfully visual novels, concerned with the inexorability of human destiny..
Source: Britannica and An ABC of English Literature - Dr M Mofizar Rahman

Robert Browning is a Victorian poet and the rest are Romantic poet.
Robert Browning: Major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture.
Among Browning’s important publications are:
- The Ring and the Book (1868–69),
- Pauline (1833),
- Bells and Pomegranates (1841–46),
- My Last Duchess,
- Men and Women (1855),
- Dramatis Personae (1864), 
- Asolando (1889).

Source: britannica and goodreads

Harold Pinter, (born Oct. 10, 1930, London, Eng.—died Dec. 24, 2008, London), English playwright, who achieved international renown as one of the most complex and challenging post-World War II dramatists. In 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Works:
- The Room (1957)
- The Birthday Party (1957),
- The Dumb Waiter (1957),
- The Caretaker (1959),
- The Homecoming (1964),
- Landscape (1967),
- Silence (1968),
- No Man’s Land (1974)
Source: britannica and NobelPrize.org