Major Authors and Representative Texts
This domain tests accurate recall of who wrote what, when, and why it matters. Pairing questions are common, so build a mental table of author, title, approximate date and one distinguishing feature.
Core pairings
- Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth (about 1606), The Tempest (about 1611).
- Milton: Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse.
- Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads (1798); The Prelude; Biographia Literaria.
- Keats: the 1819 odes; Shelley: Ozymandias, Prometheus Unbound; Byron: Don Juan.
- Austen: Pride and Prejudice (1813); Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre (1847); Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847).
- Dickens: Great Expectations, Hard Times; George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871-72); Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891).
- Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1899); Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925); Joyce: Dubliners (1914), Ulysses (1922).
- Indian English: Anand, Untouchable (1935); Raja Rao, Kanthapura (1938); Narayan, The Guide (1958); Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981); poetry by Kamala Das, A. K. Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel.
Worked example
A clue reads: stream of consciousness, a single June day in London, a shell-shocked war veteran. Match the markers. Stream of consciousness points to Woolf or Joyce; the single day points to Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway; the veteran, Septimus, settles it as Mrs Dalloway (1925). Use two or three independent markers before committing to a title.
Traps that cost marks
- Swapping the Bronte sisters.
- Confusing George Eliot with T. S. Eliot.
- Attributing a poem's words to the poet rather than to the speaker.
- Vague dating that could fit any century.