GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
Example Questions
Example Question #3 : Contexts Of American Plays After 1925
Which of the following is not a character in Angels in America?
Harper Pitt
Prior Walter
Amanda Wingfield
Roy Cohn
Louis Ironson
Amanda Wingfield
Amanda Wingfield is a character in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, not Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
Example Question #13 : Contexts Of American Plays
Who wrote Death of a Salesman?
Lynn Nottage
Wendy Wasserstein
Eugene O’Neill
Arthur Miller
Suzan-Lori Parks
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 #14 : Contexts Of American Plays
The author of Death of a Salesman also wrote all but which of the following plays?
The Crucible
They Too Arise
A View from the Bridge
All My Sons
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 #6 : 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 #11 : Contexts Of American Plays
During what decade was Death of a Salesman first performed?
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
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 #15 : Contexts Of American Plays
Which of the following literary devices does not appear in Angels in America?
Hallucinatory visions
Monologue
Religious allusions
Doubling
Deus ex machina
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.
Example Question #22 : Contexts Of American Plays
When was Our Town first performed?
1940s
1950s
1970s
1930s
1960s
1930s
Although it was set several decades earlier, the play debuted in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the same year.
Example Question #21 : Contexts Of American Plays
Who wrote A Raisin in the Sun?
August Wilson
Tony Kushner
Adrienne Kennedy
Lorraine Hansberry
Tom Stoppard
Lorraine Hansberry
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America (1993). Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). August Wilson wrote Fences (1987). Adrienne Kennedy wrote A Lesson in Dead Language (1968). All of these authors are major award-winning, twentieth-century American playwrights.
Example Question #72 : Contexts Of Plays
The title of A Raisin in the Sun was based on a poem by which American author?
Maya Angelou
Gwendolyn Brooks
Langston Hughes
Gertrude Stein
ee cummings
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes’ famous poem “Harlem” (also called “A Dream Deferred”) (1951) likens a delayed dream to a grape that withers into a raisin in the sun.
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
