For the post of Written Recruitment Test for the post of Postgraduate
Assistants in Tamil Nadu Higher Secondary Educational Service.
Syllabus: English (Subject Code: P02)
Unit-I – MODERN LITERATURE (1400-1600)
Poetry
For Detailed Study
Chaucer : Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
Spenser : Faerie Queene - Book-I
For Non-detailed Study
Spenser : Prothalamion and Epithalamion
Wyatt, Surrey: Selections in Peacock's English verse, Vol-I
Ballads : Peacock - Vol-II
Prose
For Detailed Study
Bacon - Essays - Of Truth, Of Adversity, Of Studies,
Of Revenge, Of Ambition, Of Friendship
Sidney : Apologie For Poetrie
For Non-detailed Study
The Bible : The Book of Job.
Drama
For Detailed Study
Marlowe : Dr. Faustus
For Non-Detailed Study
Kyd : The Spanish Tragedy
Ben Jonson : The Alchemist
Unit-II - MODERN LITERATURE (1600-1798)
Poetry
For Detailed study
Donne : Canonisation, The Ecstasie
Milton : Paradise Lost, Book-IX
Pope : The Rape of the Lock.
For Non-detailed Study
Milton : Samson Agonistes
Gray, Collins & Blake: Peacock's English Verse - Vol-III
Herbert : 1. Affliction 2. The Pulley
Marvell : To His Coy Mistress
Prose
For Detailed Study
Johnson : Life of Milton
For Non-Detailed Study
Bunyan : The Pilgrim's Progress
Fielding : Tom Jones
Drama
For Detailed Study
Dryden : All for Love
Sheridan : The School for Scandal
For Non-detailed Study :
Congreve : The way of the World
Goldsmith : She stoops to conquer
Unit-III - MODERN LITERATURE (1798 - 1832)
Poetry
For Detailed Study
Wordsworth : Immortality Ode, Tintern Abbey
Coleridge : Ode to Dejection, Kubla Khan
Keats : Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Autumn.
Shelley : Ode to the West Wind
For Non-Detailed Study
Wordsworth : Prelude - Book-I
Shelley : Adonais
Prose
For Detailed Study
Lamb : Essays of Elia
Christ's Hospital, The South Sea House, Dream children, New Year's Eve
Hazlitt : My First Acquaintance with Poets.
For Non-Detailed Study
Shelley : A Defence of Poetry
Wordsworth : Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1850)
Jane Austen : Emma
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Unit-IV - MODERN LITERATURE (1832 to the present day)
Poetry
For Detailed Study:
Arnold : Dover Beach, The Scholar Gypsy
Browning : Andrea Del Sarto
Tennyson : Morte D' Arthur
W.B.Yeats : Byzantium
Eliot : The Waste land
For Non-Detailed Study:
Hopkins : The Wreck of the Deutschland
The selections from
(i) Owen (ii) W.H.Auden (iii) Stephen Spender in the Faber Book of Modern Verse.
Prose
For Detailed Study:
Carlyle : The Hero as a Man of Letters
(from “On Heroes and Hero Worship”)
Mathew Arnold: The Study of Poetry
T.S.Eliot : Tradition and Individual Talent
For Non-detailed Study:
Dickens : Great Expectations
George Elliot : Middle March
Hardy : Jude the Obscure
Virginia Woolf : To the Light House
Graham Greene : The Power and the Glory
Unit-V - SHAKESPEARE
Drama
For Detailed Study
Macbeth, The Tempest
For Non-Detailed Study
Henry–IV Part-I: Measure for Measure
Antony and Cleopatra
A general knowledge of the other plays, poems and sonnets of Shakespeare is expected of the candidates.
Unit-VI AMERICAN LITERATURE
Poetry
Detailed study
Walt Whitman : Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
Emily Dickinson : Because I could not Stop for Death
Robert Frost : Mending Wall, Birches, West Running Brook.
Sylvia Plath : Daddy
Non-Detailed Study
Walt Whitman : Passage to India
E.E.Cummings : The Cambridge Ladies
Hart Crane : Poem: To Brooklyn Bridge.
Fiction
Mark Twain : The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Melville : Moby Dick
Hemingway : The Old Man and the Sea
Prose
Detailed study
Emerson : The American Scholar
Faulkner : Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.
Non-Detailed Study
Thoreau : Walden
James Thurcer : The Owl in the Attic
Drama
Detailed study
Eugene O’ Neil : The Hairy Ape
Arthur Miller : The Death of a Salesman
Non-Detailed Study
Tennesse Williams : A Street Car named Desire
Edward Albee : Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Unit-VII INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH
Poetry
Detailed Study:
Tagore : Gitanjali
Aurobindo : Thought the Paraclete
Non-Detailed Study:
Poems of Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt from the Golden Treasury of Indian Poetry.
Poems of A.K.Ramanujam, R. Parthasarathy, Kamala Das and Nissim Ezekiel from “Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets” ed. R.Parthasarathy.
Fiction
Mulk Raj Anand : Coolie
Raja Rao : Kantapura
R.K. Narayan : The English Teacher
Kamala Markandaya: A Handful of Rice.
Prose
Detailed Study:
Ananda Commarasamy Aurobindo:The Dance of Shiva (The Title Essay)
Non-Detailed Study:
Nehru : An Autobiography
Drama
Detailed Study:
Tagore : Muktha Dhara
Girish Karnad : Tughlaq
Non-Detailed Study:
Gurucharan Das : Larine Sahib
Commonwealth Literature
Poetry
Non-Detailed Study:
E.J. Pratt : The Dying Eagle
Judith Wright : Fire in the Murdering Hut, The Cedars
Wole Soyinka : The Telephone conversation
Abioseh Nicoll : The Meaning of Africa
A.D.Hope : Australia
Drama
Detailed Study
Wole Soyinka : The Lion and the Jewel
Non–Detailed Study
Douglas Stewart : Ned Kelly
Prose
Chinua Achebe : The Novelist as Teacher
Fiction
Chinua Achebe : Things Fall Apart
Alan Paten : Cry, the Beloved Country
Unit-VIII -- APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
1. Modern Drama
2. Modern Fiction
3. Literary Movements
4. Literary Criticism and Theory
5. Feminism
6. Teaching of English in India
7. Journalism and Creative Writing in English
8. Post – Modernism
Unit-IX – HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
1. Origin of Language
2. Place of English in the Indo-European family
3. General Characteristics of Old and Middle English
4. The rise and growth of Modern English
5. Growth of Vocabulary Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Scandinavian and other foreign influences – Word Formation.
6. Change of Meaning
7. The Makers of English, The Bible, Spenserm, Shakespeare, Milton and Dr.Johnson.
8. American English
9. Indian English
10. Characteristics of Modern English
11. Spelling Reform
12. The English Lexicon
Books for reference:
1) Henry Bradley: The Making of English
2) F.T.Wood : An outline History of the English Language
3) A.C.Baugh : A History of the English Language
LINGUISTICS
Definitions – The Nature and Scope of linguistics, Speech and Writing,
Form and Meaning
Words, Clause and Phrase – Concord Government– Sentence Pattern
Phonology
Morphology
Idiolect, Dialect
Transformational Generative Grammar
Books for Study
Frank Plalee : Grammar, ELBS
John Lyons : An introduction to Theoretical linguistics
Unit-X PRINCIPLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM
1. Aristotle : Poetics
2. Dryden : Essay of Dramatic Poesy
3. Coleridge : Biographia Literaria Ch.XIV and Ch.XVII
4. Keats : Letters (from English Critical Tradition-Macmillan)
5. T.S.Elliot : Metaphysical poets
6. I.A.Richards : Four kinds of Meaning
7. William Empson : The Seventh Type of Ambiguity
8. Northrop Frye : The Archetypes of Literature
9. L.Trilling : Sense of the Past
10. Brooks : Irony as a Principle of Structure
11. Allen Tate : Tension in Poetry
