Civil Services Mains exam syllabus: English

(Answers must be written in English)

Paper I

The required text is listed below. Adequate knowledge of the following topics and movements is also required:

The Renaissance: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama; Metaphysical Poetry; The Epic and the Mock-epic; Neo-classicism; Satire; The Romantic Movement; The Rise of the Novel; The Victorian Age.

Section A

William Shakespeare: King Lear, The Tempest

John Donne: Canonization, Death be not proud, The Good Morrow, On his Mistress going to bed, The Relic

John Milton: Paradise Lost, I, II, IV, IX

Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock

William Wordsworth: Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, Three years she grew, She dwelt among untrodden ways, Michael, Resolution and Independence, The World is too much with us, Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour, Upon Westminster Bridge

Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam

Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House

Section B

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

Charles Dickens: Hard Times

George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Paper II

The required text is listed below. Adequate knowledge of the following topics and movements is also required:

Modernism; Poets of the Thirties; The stream-of-consciousness Novel; Absurd Drama; Colonialism and Post-Colonialism; Indian Writing in English; Marxist, Psychoanalytical and Feminist approaches to literature; Post-Modernism.

Section A

William Butler Yeats: Easter 1916, The Second Coming, A Prayer for my daughter, Sailing to Byzantium, The Tower, Among School Children, Leda and the Swan, Meru, Lapis Lazuli, The Second Coming, Byzantium

T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, Journey of the Magi, Burnt Norton

W.H. Auden: Partition, Musee des Beaux Arts, in Memory of W.B. Yeats, Lay your sleeping head, my love, The Unknown Citizen, Consider, Mundus Et Infans, The Shield of Achilles, September 1, 1939, Petition

John Osborne: Look Back in Anger

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Philip Larkin: Next, Please, Deceptions, Afternoons, Days, Mr. Bleaney

A.K. Ramanujan: Looking for a Causim on a Swing, A River, Of Mothers, among other Things, Love Poem for a Wife 1, Samll-Scale Reflections on a Great House, Obituary

(NOTE: All these poems are available in the anthology Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, edited by R. Parthasarthy, published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi)

Section B

Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim

James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

E.M. Forster: A Passage to India

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

Raja Rao: Kanthapura

V.S. Naipal: A House for Mr. Biswas

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