GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Contexts of Plays
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
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Example Questions
Example Question #516 : Cultural And Historical Contexts
ARKADINA (From inside the house): Boris! Boris!
TRIGORIN: She is calling me, probably to come and pack, but I don't want to leave this place. (His eyes rest on the lake) What a blessing such beauty is!
NINA: Do you see that house there, on the far shore?
TRIGORIN: Yes.
NINA: That was my dead mother's home. I was born there, and have lived all my life beside this lake. I know every little island in it.
TRIGORIN: This is a beautiful place to live. (He catches sight of the dead seagull) What is that?
NINA: A gull. Constantine shot it.
TRIGORIN: What a lovely bird! Really, I can't bear to go away. Can't you persuade Irina to stay? (He writes something in his notebook.)
All but which of the following authors worked in the same non-literary profession as this playwright?
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Ernest Hemingway
William Carlos Williams
William Somerset Maugham
Ernest Hemingway
This question requires you to recognize that Anton Chekhov was a practicing medical doctor for much of his literary career. Other authors who were doctors (and whose works sometimes drew on their medical experience) include William Carlos Williams, William Somerset Maugham, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While Ernest Hemingway worked as an ambulance driver during World War I, he was not medically trained.
Passage adapted from Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896).
Example Question #101 : Contexts Of Plays
Who of the following is not a Caribbean playwright?
Wole Solinka
Earl Lovelace
Aimé Césaire
Derek Walcott
Kamau Brathwaite
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 #21 : Contexts Of World Plays
Who of the following is not an African dramatist?
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Ama Ata Aidoo
Jean Rhys
Ola Rotimi
Wole Soyinka
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 #102 : Contexts Of Plays
Which of these European playwrights was a staunch Marxist?
Eugene Ionesco
Jean Genet
Bertolt Brecht
Henrik Ibsen
Friedrich Schiller
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 #103 : Contexts Of Plays
Which of the following playwrights did not write work belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd?
Fernando Arrabal
Jean Genet
Samuel Beckett
Tennessee Williams
Eugene Ionesco
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 #104 : Contexts Of Plays
What is the subject of the play A Doll’s House?
nineteenth-century marital norms
wartime attitudes toward pacifists in Germany
shifting political regimes in Norway
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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