11POINTS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE

1.    Harold Bloom- the theorist divided poets into “strong” and “weak” and popularised the practice of misreading.

2.    In The Rape of the Lock Pope repeatedly compares Belinda to the Sun.

3.    W.M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair owes its title to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s progress.

4.    Homi Bhabha in his essay “Signs taken for wonders” discuss the “discovery’’ of English in colonial India.

5.    Edumund Spenser’s Amoretti was the first sonnet sequence in English.

6.    “Kubla khan” takes an epigraph from Samuel Purchas’ Purchas His pilgrimage

7.    “L’Allegro” and “II Penseroso”  are “Companion poems”

8.    The preliminary version of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a young Man was called Stephen Hero.

9.    The book “The Middle Passage” by V. S. Naipaul is subtitled THE CARIBBEAN REVISITED.

10.  “Fluency” in language is the same as the ability to put oneself across comfortably in speech and /or writing.

11. The Play “The Clouds” gained notoriety for its caricature of the philosopher Socrates.