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Literature Quiz


Quiz

  1. Who wrote the 1955 novel Lolita?
  2. Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is a collection of how many stories?
  3. Which 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley presents a nightmarish vision of a future society?
  4. Who wrote the long narrative poem, Hiawatha?
  5. Which famous writer lived with his family in Saint Peter Port, Guernsey, from October 1855 until 1870?




  6. Which writer's books include Of Human Bondage and The Moon and the Sixpence?
  7. Who was Vladimir and Estragon waiting for in a play by Samuel Beckett?
  8. In which English county was Jane Austen born, in 1775?
  9. What was Thomas De Quincey eating in his 1821 autobiographical account?
  10. Which English author and playwright wrote the 1967 travel guide Vanishing Cornwall?
  11. In which European city did English Romantic poet John Keats die in 1821?
  12. Which term meaning a mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with an amusing effect is derived from a character in Richard Sheridan's play The Rivals?
  13. Which novel was not published openly in the UK until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books?
  14. Who wrote Lady Windermere's Fan, a four-act comedy play first performed in 1892, at the St James's Theatre in London?
  15. Which Rupert Brooke's poem is read aloud twice in the 1969 film, Oh! What a Lovely War?
  16. The Morlocks are a fictional species created for which 1895 novel?
  17. Which science fiction anti-war novel with the alternative title The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death follows the life of Billy Pilgrim?
  18. Ophelia is a fictional character in which William Shakespeare tragedy?
  19. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes which English writer as arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history"?
  20. Gigi is a 1944 novella by which French writer?
  21. What was John Fowles third published novel, after The Collector and The Magus?
  22. In modern literature, what name is given to a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead?
  23. Inspector Bucket, a fictional character often called the first important detective in English literature, is found in which Charles Dicken's novel?
  24. Who wrote the 1996 novel The Green Mile?
  25. Which British physician and lexicographer is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases?
  26. Can you name the most famous novel of British writer Richard Llewellyn?
  27. His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by which author?
  28. Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by which English author?
  29. Who wrote the novel Trainspotting?
  30. Who is often said to be the first English women to earn her living by writing, she also wrote the short work of fiction entitled Oroonoko?



Answers:

  1. Vladimir Nabokov
  2. 24 stories
  3. Brave New World
  4. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  5. Victor Hugo
  6. Somerset Maugham
  7. Godot
  8. Hampshire
  9. Opium (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater)
  10. Daphne du Maurier
  11. Rome
  12. Malapropism (from Mrs. Malaprop)
  13. Lady Chatterley's Lover (a novel by D. H. Lawrence)
  14. Oscar Wilde
  15. The Soldier
  16. The Time Machine (by H. G. Wells)
  17. Slaughterhouse-Five (by Kurt Vonnegut)
  18. Hamlet
  19. Samuel Johnson (or, Dr. Johnson)
  20. Colette
  21. The French Lieutenant's Woman
  22. Elegy
  23. Bleak House



  24. Stephen King
  25. Peter Roget
  26. How Green Was My Valley
  27. Philip Pullman
  28. Sebastian Faulks
  29. Irvine Welsh
  30. Aphra Behn