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 #2 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
Which of the following is not a character from A Streetcar Named Desire?
Stanley Kowalski
Harold Mitchell
Blanche DuBois
Prior Walter
Stella Kowalski
Prior Walter
Prior Walter is a character from the play Angels in America, not from A Streetcar Named Desire.
Example Question #1 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
Who wrote the play Angels in America?
Suzan-Lori Parks
Tony Kushner
Eugene O’Neill
Lynn Nottage
Arthur Miller
Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner is the author of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which was more recently adapted into an HBO miniseries. The play is divided into two parts (which can be performed together or separately): Millennium Approaches and Perestroika.
Example Question #3 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
In what decade was Angels in America first performed?
1980s
1960s
1950s
1970s
1990s
1990s
The play premiered in 1991 and won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. If you didn’t know this, though, you could still infer that the play was performed in 1990s, as a central subject is the AIDS crisis that was just becoming widespread in America in the mid- to late-1980s.
Example Question #4 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
Which of the following is not a character in Angels in America?
Harper Pitt
Amanda Wingfield
Roy Cohn
Prior Walter
Louis Ironson
Amanda Wingfield
Amanda Wingfield is a character in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, not Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
Example Question #5 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
Who wrote Death of a Salesman?
Lynn Nottage
Arthur Miller
Suzan-Lori Parks
Wendy Wasserstein
Eugene O’Neill
Arthur Miller
This author is Arthur Miller, an important American playwright and essayist. Miller is famous for being married to Marilyn Monroe and for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee as well as for his significant contributions to American drama, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and various other honors.
Example Question #6 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
The author of Death of a Salesman also wrote all but which of the following plays?
All My Sons
They Too Arise
A View from the Bridge
The Crucible
The Violent Bear It Away
The Violent Bear It Away
The Violent Bear It Away is actually a novel by Flannery O’Connor and not a play at all. The other four works are all dramas written by Miller between 1937 and 1955.
Example Question #2 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
Which of the following is not a character in Death of a Salesman?
Happy Loman
Willy Loman
Miss Forsythe
Biff Loman
Martha
Martha
Martha is a central character in Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and not in Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Example Question #61 : Contexts Of Plays
During what decade was Death of a Salesman first performed?
1940s
1920s
1930s
1910s
1900s
1940s
This play not only premiered in but also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949. If you didn’t know this, you could still eliminate some of the answer choices if you knew that Arthur Miller wasn’t born until 1915.
Example Question #481 : Cultural And Historical Contexts
Which of the following literary devices does not appear in Angels in America?
Doubling
Religious allusions
Deus ex machina
Hallucinatory visions
Monologue
Deus ex machina
Angels in America features doubling (one actor playing two or more roles), Biblical allusions and visitations from angels, monologues by several of the main characters, and hallucinatory visions. It does not include deus ex machina, which is a theatrical device whereby something unexpected and unexplained intervenes to fix a plot problem and drastically alter the course of the play. (A famous deus ex machina occurs in Hamlet in the form of the pirates.)
Example Question #12 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
When was Long Day’s Journey Into Night first performed?
1940s
1980s
1970s
1960s
1950s
1950s
Although it was written a decade earlier, the play did not debut until 1956. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957.
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All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
