ENGLISH 2310                                                                     FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE

GRADY                                                                                 FALL 2013

 

A. Terms you should be able to identify (5 of 7; 20%):

Text Box: Glorious Revolution Oliver Cromwell heroic couplet mock epic Petrarch blazon
 


felix culpa                   

carpe diem                 

uxoriousness

in medias res    

epic simile      

prevenient grace 

Restoration

 

 

B. Passages you should be able to identify (6 of 8, roughly 36%)—they will be drawn from Paradise Lost, Books 1-5, 8-10, 12; Pope’s Rape of the Lock; the poetry of Donne (“The Canonization,” “The Indifferent,” “The Flea,” "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning") and  Marvell (“To His Coy Mistress); and sonnets by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare.

 

C. A surprise section worth 7-9 points!

 

D. One of the following essay questions will appear on the exam (roughly 36%):

                          

1. Compare Milton's account of the rewards and dangers of love--human love--in Paradise Lost with the view of love in the work of at least two other poets of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.

 

2. Epic poems are typically heroic poems--think Beowulf--but although Milton models Paradise Lost on the epic poems of Homer and Vergil, his subject requires him to develop a different account of heroism than that usually found in the epic tradition.  What sort of actions does Milton portray as heroic in Paradise Lost?  What is his attitude toward the traditional notion of heroic behavior described in other poems?  Does Paradise Lost even have a hero?  Does it have more than one? (Note: not questions to answer in sequence!)

 

3. Does it matter—is it significant—that Milton gives Eve the last speech of Paradise Lost? If so, why?  If not, why not?

 

4. Milton’s Eve and Pope’s Belinda are both described as having a great deal of charm.  Does this trait, and the others that they are praised for, mean that they are presented for our admiration or imitation by their respective poets?  Or are Eve and Belinda just two more instances in the long history of antifeminism in English literature? (Or are they different from one another?)