English Literature UGC NET June 2026: Deconstructing Paper Pattern & Insights on Key Areas

PYQ — Which of the following statements about Geoffrey Chaucer are correct?

1. Chaucer's first work, The Book of the Duchess, is a dream-poem on the death in 1368 of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt.
2. In The House of Fame, it is the first time that Dante's epic of a journey to Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell — The Divine Comedy — is echoed in English.
3. The Canterbury Tales absorbs literary, historical, religious, social, and moral concerns, and transcends them all.
4. In The Legend of Good Women, Cupid and Venus, passion and desire, innocence and knowledge, are all invoked.
5. The Miller's Tale is an old-fashioned fable, a story of deception in war, almost similar to The Knight's Tale.

Q.83 — The following lines are spoken by which character in Shakespeare's plays?

Put out the light and then put out the light;
If I quench thee, thou flaming Minister,
I can again thy former light restore—

1. King Lear
2. Hamlet
3. Othello
4. Macbeth

Match List-I with List-II:

Q.40 — Which of the following plays of William Shakespeare was translated into Bengali and directed by Girish Chandra Ghosh?

1. The Tempest
2. Hamlet
3. Macbeth
4. King Lear

Q.90 — Which two plays of Anton Chekhov made creative use of Shakespeare's Hamlet?

1. A Marriage Proposal
2. Three Sisters
3. The Cherry Orchard
4. Uncle Vanya
5. The Seagull

PYQ — Which of the following details about the Dramatis Personae of The Duchess of Malfi are correct?

1. FERDINAND [Duke of Calabria].
2. CARDINAL [Executioner].
3. ANTONIO [BOLOGNA, Steward of the Household to the Duchess].
4. DELIO [Court Officer].
5. DANIEL DE BOSOLA [Gentleman of the Horse to the Duchess].

PYQ — Which of the following descriptions of characters from William Congreve's The Way of the World is incorrect?

1. Fainall, in love with Mrs. Marwood
2. Mirabell, in love with Mrs. Millamant
3. Witwoud, follower of Mrs. Millamant
4. Petulant, follower of Mrs. Marwood

PYQ — In which of the following novels of Charles Dickens is the city of London shown shrouded in fog in the opening chapter?

1. Bleak House
2. A Tale of Two Cities
3. Oliver Twist
4. David Copperfield

PYQ — Arrange the following events in chronological order related to George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man:

1. Arms and the Man was first performed at the Avenue Theatre.
2. There was a release of a British film adaptation of Arms and the Man directed by Cecil Lewis.
3. A German film adaptation was released, which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
4. Arms and the Man is a comedic play, set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War, which lasted fourteen days from 14 to 28 November.
5. There was the famous London revival at The Old Vic starring Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier.

PYQ — Arrange the following statements in the order of their appearance in Bacon's essay "Of Studies":

1. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring
2. To spend too much time in studies, is sloth
3. Crafty men contemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them
4. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience
5. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend

PYQ — Arrange the following novels in chronological order of their publication:

1. The Handmaid's Tale
2. Lucky Jim
3. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
4. Things Fall Apart

PYQ — Arrange the following works of criticism in chronological order:

1. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
2. J.C. Smith, A Study of Wordsworth
3. D. G. James, Scepticism and Poetry
4. Marjorie L. Barstow, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction
5. Josephine Miles, Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century

PYQ — Arrange the following poetic lines chronologically in order of the publication of the poems they appear in:

1. She is the Rose, the glorie of the day,
2. Resembles life what once was deem'd of light,
3. Away! The moor is dark beneath the moon
4. When I consider how my light is spent
5. When in the chronicle of wasted time / I see descriptions of the fairest wights,

PYQ — Arrange the following famous lines of drama in chronological order of their publication:

1. Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!
2. All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players.
3. Come, violent death, / Serve for mandragora to make me sleep!
4. The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
5. Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that.

PYQ — Match the characters and roles from Yeats's The Countess Cathleen:

PYQ — In 1832, Samuel Taylor Coleridge described "three silent revolutions in England." Identify the wrong option:

1. When the Professions fell off from the Church
2. When the fraternity fell off from the society
3. When Literature fell off from the Professions
4. When the Press fell off from Literature

PYQ — Which of the following statements are correct about research methods?

1. Structuralism identifies structures in language, or systems of relationships with identities and meanings that shows us the ways in which we think.
2. Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language systems distinguishes between la langue and la parole.
3. Sometimes called the "school of London," these new critics include Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Tzvetan Todorov.
4. Shklovsky pointed out literature's constant tendency toward estrangement and defamiliarization to move readers away from habitual responses to ordinary experience.
5. Jonathan Culler and Robert Scholes helped to bring psychoanalysis to the English language.

PYQ — Match List-I (Critical Essay) with List-II (Writer):

PYQ — Which of the following descriptions of the arbitrary nature of the sign given by Ferdinand de Saussure in Course in General Linguistics is incorrect?

1. The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.
2. The linguistic sign is arbitrary.
3. The word symbol has been used to designate the linguistic meaning or more specifically, the signified.
4. Symbol is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified.

PYQ — Which of the following titles/chapters appear in I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism?

1. Poetry for Poetry's Sake
2. Critical principles: The indemonstrability of values
3. On Looking at a Picture
4. The Theory of Interpretation
5. The Analysis of a Poem

PYQ — Which of the following seasons does Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, not indicate the correspondent genres?

1. The mythos of spring: comedy
2. The mythos of summer: romance
3. The mythos of fall: tragedy
4. The mythos of winter: satire

PYQ — Which of the following have been written by Ien Ang?

1. "Wanted: Audience"
2. "Culture and Communication: Towards an Ethnographic Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System"
3. "The Photographic Message"
4. "Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure"
5. "On Popular Music"

PYQ — Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield define "Cultural materialism" as designating a critical method having certain characteristics. Which of the following has NOT been included?

1. Historical context
2. Theoretical method
3. Political commitment
4. Transcendental significance

PYQ — Match the following terms with their theorists:

PYQ — According to Jeremy Hawthorn, which of the following can be said to "have prepared the ground for the development of theories of the gaze"?

1. John Berger's Ways of Seeing
2. Michael Argyle and Mark Cook's Gaze and Mutual Gaze
3. Sigmund Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
4. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

PYQ — Match List-I (Concept) with List-II (Meaning):

PYQ — Arrange the following levels of obliquity (Vakrata) as conceived by Kuntaka in Vakrokti Jivitam:

1. Episodic
2. Compositional
3. Phonetic
4. Lexical
5. Grammatical

PYQ — Girish Karnad's Hayavadana and Thomas Mann's short novel The Transposed Heads is based on the tale of:

1. Hitopdesha
2. Panchtantra
3. Jataka Katha
4. Katha-sarit-sagara

PYQ — Which of the following books has an account of the 'Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of Civilization'?

1. A Passage to England
2. A Passage to India
3. Timeless India
4. Defence of India

PYQ — Match R. K. Narayan's novels with their themes:

PYQ — Match authors with their ethnic/religious backgrounds:

PYQ — Which of the following is NOT one of the conceptions of Dalit aesthetics given by Sharankumar Limbale?

1. Human beings are first and foremost human — this is satyam.
2. The liberation of human beings is shivam.
3. The humanity of human beings is sundaram.
4. The equality, liberty, justice and fraternity of human beings are satyam and sundaram.

PYQ — Match List-I (Component) with List-II (Area of Language):

PYQ — Which of the following definitions of social variation in language is incorrect?

1. Convergence is a speech style that attempts to reduce social distance, and use forms that are similar to those used by the person we are talking to.
2. A register is a conventional way of using language that is appropriate in a specific context, which may be identified as situational, occupational or topical.
3. Slang describes words or phrases that are used instead of more everyday terms among younger speakers and other groups with special interests.
4. Jargons are words and phrases, often involving body parts, bodily functions and sexual acts, that people avoid for reasons related to religion, politeness and prohibited behaviour.

PYQ — Which of the following is an example of a Functional Morpheme?

1. Teach
2. And
3. -er
4. -ed

PYQ — Arrange the following Manners of Articulation of the consonants of English in chronological order:

1. Close Approximation
2. Intermittent closure
3. Complete closure and sudden release
4. Complete closure and slow release
5. Open Approximation