GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Contexts of World Plays After 1925
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
Example Questions
Example Question #1 : Contexts Of World Plays After 1925
Who of the following is not a Caribbean playwright?
Wole Solinka
Earl Lovelace
Aimé Césaire
Kamau Brathwaite
Derek Walcott
Wole Solinka
Wole Solinka is a dramatist, but he is from Nigeria, not the Caribbean. He is the first African recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his plays, which feature colonialism and African politics, include Death and the King’s Horsemen, Kongi’s Harvest, and A Dance of the Forests.
Example Question #2 : Contexts Of World Plays After 1925
Who of the following is not an African dramatist?
Ola Rotimi
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Wole Soyinka
Ama Ata Aidoo
Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys
While Jean Rhys is a renowned writer, she is Dominican and not African. Moreover, she was known for writing novels (including Wide Sargasso Sea and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie) and not plays.
Example Question #3 : Contexts Of World Plays After 1925
Which of these European playwrights was a staunch Marxist?
Jean Genet
Eugene Ionesco
Bertolt Brecht
Friedrich Schiller
Henrik Ibsen
Bertolt Brecht
This dramatist is Brecht, and his lifelong Marxist leanings were often visible in his aesthetics. His works include plays such as Mother Courage and Her Children, The Threepenny Opera, and Man Equals Man. He and his wife also co-founded and operated the Berliner Ensemble, an important post-war German theater company.
Example Question #4 : Contexts Of World Plays After 1925
Which of the following playwrights did not write work belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd?
Tennessee Williams
Jean Genet
Eugene Ionesco
Fernando Arrabal
Samuel Beckett
Tennessee Williams
Only Tennessee Williams did not write absurdist plays emphasizing the meaninglessness of human existence. (The Theatre of the Absurd was a primarily European phenomenon, and Williams was American.)
Example Question #5 : Contexts Of World Plays After 1925
What is the subject of the play A Doll’s House?
wartime attitudes toward pacifists in Germany
shifting political regimes in Norway
nineteenth-century marital norms
social conventions surrounding treatment of the disabled
the miniaturization of urban life
nineteenth-century marital norms
Written by Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House concerns what the playwright considered to be the constricting aspects of marriage, motherhood, female domesticity, and public reputation versus private morality. The work is a tragedy and takes place in Ibsen’s native Norway in the late nineteenth century.
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