Exam-focused English literature practice sets. Each set is a multiple-choice quiz with an explanation for every answer.
Literary periods, in order
- Periods of English Literature: the chronological framework — 25 questions. Start here: the whole timeline and its dates.
- History of English Literature: ages, authors and events — 20 questions across the full sweep.
- The Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Period — 25 questions, from the Germanic invasion to 1066.
- The Middle English Period — 25 questions, 1066 to 1500.
- The Renaissance, Set 1: Introduction and Foundations — 25 questions.
- The Renaissance, Set 2: Meaning, Humanism and Characteristics — 25 questions.
- The Renaissance, Set 3: Reformation, Humanism and the Elizabethan Age — 50 questions.
- The Renaissance Age: Consolidated Question Bank — 92 questions drawing the Renaissance sets together for revision.
- The Jacobean Age (1603–1625) — 50 questions on revenge tragedy, city comedy, Webster and Middleton.
- 17th Century Metaphysical Poetry — 25 questions on Donne, the conceit and the metaphysical school.
- The Neo-Classical Age (1660–1798) — 50 questions on the Restoration, the Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson.
- The Romantic Age (1798–1832) — 50 questions on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats.
- The Victorian Age (1837–1901) — 50 questions on faith and doubt, Tennyson, Browning and the novelists.
- The Modern Age (1901–1945) — 50 questions on modernism, the war poets, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce and Woolf.
- Postmodernism (1945–present) — 50 questions on theory, metafiction and contemporary fiction.
- Macbeth: Act 1 — 50 questions, close textual study.
- Macbeth: Act 2 — 50 questions, close textual study.
- Macbeth: Act 3 — 50 questions, close textual study.
- Macbeth: Act 4 — 50 questions, close textual study.
- Macbeth: Act 5 — 50 questions, close textual study.
- Macbeth: Comprehensive Revision — 50 questions across the whole play.
- Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 — 50 questions, close textual study of “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”.
- Donne: The Sun Rising — 50 questions, close textual study of the aubade and its conceits.
- Keats: Ode to a Nightingale — 80 questions, close textual study of the 1819 ode.
- Keats: A Thing of Beauty — 100 questions on the opening of Endymion, Book I.
- Neruda: Keeping Quiet — 100 questions, close textual study of the poem on silence and peace.
- Ezekiel: Night of the Scorpion — 57 questions, close textual study of the poem.
- Kolatkar: The Bus — 100 questions on the opening poem of Jejuri.
Genres and concepts
- Freytag’s Pyramid and the Theory of Plot — 50 questions on plot structure, from Aristotle to post-structuralism.
- Freytag’s Pyramid: 5 Stages, Definition, Diagram and Examples — 25 questions, with the explanatory article.
In preparation
Sets covering the Restoration and eighteenth century, the Romantics, the Victorians, the Modernists and the contemporary period are being written and will appear here as they are published.