Contexts of British Prose - AP English Literature and Composition

Only Zadie Smith’s White Teeth has not won the Booker Prize. Anne Enright’s The Gathering won in 2007, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries won in 2013, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North won in 2014, and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss won in 2006.

The ancient Greek historian Plutarch as well as the Roman historian Suetonius provided much of the background material for I, Claudius (1934). None of the others writers would have had information about Emperor Claudius, since he was not born until after their deaths.

I, Claudius was published in 1934.

All of the above figures were contemporaries of the Emperor Claudius (10 BCE to 54 CE) except for Homer (c.800 BCE to c.750 BCE).

Atonement (2001) is Ian McEwan’s eighth novel.

Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of A Pale View of Hills (1982), Martin Amis is the author of Dead Babies (1975), Julian Barnes is the author of Arthur and George (2005), and Pat Barker is the author of the Regeneration Trilogy (1991, 1993, 1995).

Ian McEwan's Atonement was published in 2001, the same year that it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Ian McEwan's Atonement is set partly in 1935 and partly in present-day England, but a significant portion of the action occurs during World War II in both France and England.

The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel by Julian Barnes. Enduring Love (1997), Saturday (2005), Solar (2010), and The Cement Garden (1978) are all by Ian McEwan.

Brideshead Revisited (1945) is Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel and the work he considered his magnum opus.

Kingsley Amis wrote Lucky Jim (1954), Graham Greene wrote The Third Man (1950), Ian McEwan wrote Solar (2010), and D.H Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers (1913).

Brideshead Revisited was written after the author’s parachute accident in 1943 and was published in 1945.

Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) begins in the 1920s in Britain and concludes in the late 1940s, shortly after the end of World War II.

Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934), Scoop (1938), and The Loved One (1948) are all by Evelyn Waugh. The Quiet American is a 1955 novel by the English author Graham Greene.

Published in 1922, Ulysses occurs on a single day in Dublin. The novel is highly experimental, relying heavily on allusion, stream-of-consciousness, and esoteric wordplay.

This is George Eliot, whose given name was Mary Anne Evans and who wrote nineteenth-century masterpieces such as Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Mill on the Floss. She is said to have used a pen name in part to protect her privacy and in part to ensure that her works would be taken seriously and not considered as representative of the light-hearted romances that women were assumed to write exclusively.

A Tale of Two Cities takes place in the years leading up to and during the French Revolution (1789-1799). It concerns the adventures of Sydney Carton, his doppelgänger Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette and her father, the Defarges, Jacques One through Three, and the Crunchers.

Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 by Emily Brönte, concerns jealousy and a love triangle between the lower-class Heathcliff, the middle-class Catherine Earnshaw, and the wealthy Edgar Linton.

Published in 1891, The Picture of Dorian Gray investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. It does so through the story of a young man (Dorian Gray) who has a magical portrait painted of him (by Basil Hallward) that enables him to remain young and unblemished despite his increasingly repugnant and unethical actions. The novel’s emphasis on the utility of art and the artist and preoccupation with beautiful things make it most closely linked to aestheticism, which emphasizes form and style above all else.

Written by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels parodies the popular travelogues of eighteenth-century Europe. It was considered fashionable at the time to travel to an exotic land and then publish an account of the journey, but Swift’s satire transcends the genre by presenting a deeper investigation of human nature and social goods.

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe is the first novel written in English among these answer choices. While Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote precedes Robinson Crusoe by more than a hundred years, it originally was written in Spanish.