GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Cultural and Historical Contexts
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
Example Questions
Example Question #4 : Contexts Of British Plays After 1925
Who is the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966)?
Eugène Ionesco
Eugene O’Neill
Samuel Beckett
Tom Stoppard
Harold Pinter
Tom Stoppard
This play is written by Tom Stoppard.
Example Question #41 : Contexts Of British Plays
Which of the following is not a character in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead?
Polonius
Gertrude
Fortinbras
Falstaff
Ophelia
Falstaff
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966)shares many of its characters with Hamlet. Only Falstaff is not taken from Hamlet; he is a major character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I (1600).
Example Question #697 : Gre Subject Test: Literature In English
Who wrote The Birthday Party?
Edward Albee
Samuel Beckett
Harold Pinter
Eugène Ionesco
Eugene O’Neill
Harold Pinter
The author is Harold Pinter. The Birthday Party (1958) is one of his most famous plays.
Example Question #1 : Contexts Of British Plays After 1925
Who is the protagonist of The Birthday Party?
Stanley Webber
McCann
Petey Boles
Goldberg
Meg Boles
Stanley Webber
Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1958) follows a former piano player named Stanley Webber through the events that transpire after two menacing strangers arrive at his birthday party. The rest of the characters appear in the play as well, but they are not the protagonist.
Example Question #2 : Contexts Of British Plays After 1925
Which of the following was not originally written by the author of The Birthday Party?
The Room
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Betrayal
The Caretaker
The Homecoming
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Although Harold Pinter produced a film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), the novel was originally written by John Fowles in 1969.
The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965), Betrayal (1978), and The Room (1957) were all written by Harold Pinter.
Example Question #1 : Contexts Of British Plays After 1925
Who is the author of Waiting for Godot?
Eugene O’Neill
Tom Stoppard
Harold Pinter
Eugène Ionesco
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (1953) is one of Samuel Beckett’s most famous plays.
Example Question #3 : Contexts Of British Plays After 1925
What movement does Waiting for Godot belong to?
theatre of the absurd
Dadaism
Bretonian Surrealism
Neo-realism
Modernism
theatre of the absurd
Waiting for Godot (1953) is a prime exemplar of the theatre of the absurd movement, which features surreal situations, meaningless wordplay, examination of existential questions and nihilism, and a lack of clear resolutions.
Example Question #701 : Gre Subject Test: Literature In English
Which of the following is not a character in Waiting for Godot?
Molloy
Vladimir
Pozzo
Estragon
Lucky
Molloy
Molloy is the title of a 1951 novel by Samuel Beckett, but it is not the name of a character in Waiting for Godot (1953).
Example Question #11 : Contexts Of British Plays After 1925
What famous play do the protagonists of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead originally appear in?
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire
Pygmalion
Hamlet
Henry IV Part I
Hamlet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603). Most of Stoppard’s play takes place “offstage” or behind the scenes of the actions in Hamlet, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (two of Hamlet’s friends and courtiers) acting confused about what is happening onstage without them. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was first performed in 1966.
Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), and William Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I (1600) were all used as alternate answer choices.
Example Question #51 : Contexts Of Plays
Act One, Scene One
A section of country highway. The road runs diagonally from the left, forward, to the right, rear, and can be seen in the distance winding toward the horizon like a pale ribbon between the low, rolling hills with their freshly plowed fields clearly divided from each other, checkerboard fashion, by the lines of stone walls and rough snake fences.
… At the rise of the curtain, ROBERT MAYO is discovered sitting on the fence. He is a tall, slender young man of twenty-three. There is a touch of the poet about him expressed in his high forehead and wide, dark eyes. His features are delicate and refined, leaning to weakness in the mouth and chin. He is dressed in gray corduroy trousers pushed into high-laced boots, and a blue flannel shirt with a bright colored tie. He is reading a book by the fading sunset light. He shuts this, keeping a finger in to mark the place, and turns his head toward the horizon, gazing out over the fields and hills. His lips move as if he were reciting something to himself.
His brother ANDREW comes along the road from the right, returning from his work in the fields. He is twenty-seven years old, an opposite type to ROBERT: husky, sun-bronzed, hand some in a large-featured, manly fashion a son of the soil, intelligent in a shrewd way, but with nothing of the intellectual about him. He wears overalls, leather boots, a gray flannel shirt open at the neck, and a soft, mud-stained hat pushed back on his head. He stops to talk to ROBERT, leaning on the hoe he carries.
During what decade did this play premiere and win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama?
1890s
1910s
1920s
1900s
1930s
1920s
The play debuted on Broadway in 1920 and won the Pulitzer the same year. It has been revived several times since.
Passage adapted from Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, I.i (1920; 1921 ed.)
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All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
