GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Contexts of American Prose
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
Example Questions
Example Question #92 : Contexts Of Prose
During which decade was The Shipping News published?
1980s
1990s
1950s
1970s
1960s
1990s
E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News was published in 1993 and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
Example Question #31 : Contexts Of American Prose
Which of the following is not another novel by the author of Blood Meridian?
No Country For Old Men
All the Pretty Horses
The Road
Freedom
Suttree
Freedom
McCarthy wrote The Road (2006), No Country For Old Men (2005), All the Pretty Horses (1992), and Suttree (1979). He did not, however, write Freedom; that title is a 2010 novel by Jonathan Franzen.
Example Question #32 : Contexts Of American Prose
Who is the author of Blood Meridian?
Philip Roth
Cormac McCarthy
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Carver
Jonathan Franzen
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) is Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Phillip Roth is the author of The Ghostwriter (1979), Raymond Chandler is the author of The High Window (1942), and Raymond Carver is the author of Cathedral (1983).
Example Question #33 : Contexts Of American Prose
Which genre does Blood Meridian belong to?
Künstlerroman
Picaresque
Western
Magic Realism
Southern gothic
Western
Blood Meridian (1985) is set in the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s and early 1850s and concerns the adventures of a gang of scalp hunters. It is characterized as a Modern or Revisionist Western.
Example Question #34 : Contexts Of American Prose
Which of the following is an unfinished novel by the author of Infinite Jest?
The 120 Days of Sodom
Dubrovsky
The Pale King
Billy Budd
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
The Pale King
The Pale King was posthumously published in 2011 by David Foster Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, and editor, Michael Pietsch, and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Billy Budd (1924) is by Herman Melville, The 120 Days of Sodom (1904) is by the Marquis de Sade, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) is by Charles Dickens, Dubrovsky (1841) is by Alexander Pushkin. All of these novels were also published posthumously.
Example Question #35 : Contexts Of American Prose
Who is the author of Infinite Jest?
John Updike
David Foster Wallace
Jonathan Franzen
Philip Roth
Jonathan Safran Foer
David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest (1996) is David Foster Wallace’s second of three novels. It concerns various characters at a junior tennis academy and drug addicts in a nearby substance-abuse recovery center and is written in a fragmentary, experimental form. The novel contains at least 200 pages of end notes.
Jonathan Franzen is the author of Strong Motion (1992), Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of Everything is Illuminated (2002), Phillip Roth is the author of Goodbye Columbus (1959), and John Updike is the author of Toward the End of Time (1997).
Notably, in his 1997 review of Toward the End of Time Foster Wallace classified Updike and Roth as two of America's "great male narcissists."
Example Question #32 : Contexts Of American Prose
During what decade was Infinite Jest published?
1990s
2010s
1970s
2000s
1960s
1990s
Infinite Jest (1996) was begun in the late 1980s and published in 1996.
Example Question #26 : Contexts Of American Prose After 1925
During what decade was The Corrections published?
1980s
1990s
2000s
1970s
1960s
2000s
The Corrections was published in 2001 and received the National Book Award the same year.
Example Question #36 : Contexts Of American Prose
Which of the following is not another novel by the author of Portnoy’s Complaint?
American Pastoral
Bullet Park
The Human Stain
Sabbath’s Theater
Everyman
Bullet Park
Philip Roth published American Pastoral in 1997, The Human Stain in 2000, Everyman in 2006, and Sabbath’s Theater in 1995. Bullet Park is a 1969 work by the American writer John Cheever.
Example Question #101 : Contexts Of Prose
During what decade was Portnoy’s Complaint published?
1980s
1970s
1960s
1950s
1990s
1960s
Portnoy’s Complaint was published in 1969, making it Roth’s fourth published novel.
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
