Exam topics

1. How does John Donne, as a representative of the metaphysical poets, distinguish between physical and spiritual love?
    Physical love is love that is primarily based upon the sensation or the presence of the beloved. Donne celebrates the physical side of love when he tries to convince his beloved to sleep with him. In the Valediction, Donnedescribes a spiritual love, "Inter- assured of the mind". It is based on higher and more refined feelings than sensation. Donne is critical of "dull sublunary" physical love, which could not survive in the absence of the beloved, and express a profound preference for spiritual love.

2. Present the two-periods in John Donne's life
      During the course of John Donne's life he went through two life stages: the period where he was a wild, fun-loving man, and the second where he was a well-known, respected man of the church, making him quite the opposite of his former years.

3. What does the Restoration comedy reflect?
     The Restoration comedy can be a window into a unique period of English history. The Restoration age was characterized by a sense of loss and cultural disillusion. Comedy of nanners is used as a synonym of Restoration comedy. Joseph Woodn contends that Restoration comedy "was derived from the union pf certain elements of the old comedy of Humours with certain elements in the romantic plays of the same period.

4. Jonson's comic characterization in Volpone. Demonstrate that Volpone is a comedy of humours. What does Ben Jonson understand through humour?
    A comedy of humours refers to a type of drama that focused on characters, each character representing a type of personality. They represent a character type rather than a flesh-and-blood character whose mind we can get into when we read the play. In a comedy of humors, the characters are the most important focus, so Volpone fits this criterion. Ben Jonson had given a picture of the bottom of society, so that we may call his plays commedies of bad manners.

5. The literature of restoration period
     Restauration literature is the english literature written during the historical period. Restoration literature includes Paradise lost and the Country wife. The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire which is generally anonymous. Prose, in this period, is dominated by Christian religious writing, but it also saw the beginnings of the two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism.

6. Satire in Gulliver's Travels
   Satire is a literary genre of greek origin and its purpose is often irony. In Gulliver's travels, satire is shown through narration, settings, character and plot in order to illustrate the weaknesses of human, and suggest ways of improvement. Swift uses utopia and dystopia as elements of settings and he uses a flat character, miser and tyrant type of character, moral touchstone and grotesque to illustrate the characterelement of his satirical novel. Swift uses the King of Lilliput as a flat character, the Farmer as the greedy and tyrant charactertype, the king of Laputa to illustrate the tyranny, Don Pedro as a moral touchstone. Furthermore, satire is also shown through the plot of journey and return.

7. The development of the novel
    The novel is only one of many possible narrative forms. The term for the novel in most European languages is roman. The english name is derived from the italian novella meaning a little new thing. The novel is said to have emerged with the appearance of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. These are some factors which aresaid to have influenced its development:
-journalism
-parallel art forms: biography, diaries, and personal memoirs were very fashionable in the eighteenth century
-letter writing:was cultivated as an art
-travel literature
-the restoration comedies of manners
-the picaresque convention
-the mock romance of knight
-puritanism that had always encouraged a practical attitude to world affairs, a belief in the individual conscience, a spirit of self-enquiry, a love of truth
-the rise of middle class

8. John Milton as a puritan and humanist
   John Milton was born in London. His father was a law writer who had achived some success by the time Milton was born. This prosperity afforded Milton an excellent education, first private tutoring, then a private school and finally Cambridge His father had left Roman Catholicism and Milton was raised protestant with a heavy tendency toward puritanism. Milton was a mixed product of his time. On the one hand, as a humanist, he fought for religious tolerance and believed that there was something inherently valuable in man. As a putitan, however he believed that the bible was the answer and the guide to all. Where the bible didn't afford an answer, he would turn to reason.

9. The metaphysical poets - were a succession of poets who wrote at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Their poetry was marked by such things as: intense feeling combined with ingenious thought; elaborate 'witty' images; an interest in mathematics, science and geography; an overriding interest in the soul; and direct, colloquial expression even in sonnets and lyrics.