UPSC English Literature Optional

The optional paper 1 in the UPSC Mains exam consists of question with 250 marks.

You should have profound and in-depth knowledge of following topics:

• Renaissance
• Elizabethan
• Jacobean Drama
• Metaphysical Poetry
• The Epic and Mock-Epic
• Neoclassicism
• Satire
• The Romantic Movement
• The Rise of the novel
• The Victorian Age

1. William Shakespeare: King Lear and The Tempest
2. The following poems of John Donne:
   • Canonization
   • Death be not proud
   • The Good Morrow
   • On his Mistress going to bed
   • The Relic
3. John Milton: Paradise Lost, I, II, IV, IX
4. Alexander Pope. The Rape of the Lock
5. William Wordsworth. The following poems
   • 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
6. Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam
7. Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House

1. Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels
2. Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice
3. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones
4. Charles Dickens. Hard Times
5. George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss
6. Thomas Hardy. Tess of the d'Urbervilles
7. Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

You need to study the following topics in-depth:

• Modernism
• Poets of thirties
• The stream of consciousness novel
• Absurd drama
• Colonialism & Postcolonialism
• Indian Writing in English
• Marxist
• Psychoanalytical & Feminist approaches to literature
• Postmodernism

1. William Butler Yeats. The following poems:

• - 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

2. T.S. Eliot. The following poems:

• - The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
• - Journey of the Magi
• - Burnt Norton

3. W.H. Auden. The following poems:

• - 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

4. John Osborne: Look Back in Anger
5. Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot
6. Philip Larkin

• - Next
• - Please
• - Deceptions
• - Afternoons
• - Days
• - Mr. Bleaney

7. A.K. Ramanujan

• - Looking for a Causim on a Swing
• - A River
• - Of Mothers, among other Things
• - Love Poem for a Wife 1
• - SamllScale Reflections on a Great House
• - Obituary

1. Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim
2. James Joyce. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
3. D.H. Lawrence. Sons and Lovers
4. E.M. Forster. A Passage to India
5. Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway
6. Raja Rao. Kanthapura
7. V.S. Naipaul. A House for Mr. Biswas