Cultural and Historical Contexts - AP English Literature and Composition

The Whitsun Weddings was first published in 1964. Philip Larkin was born in 1922 and died in 1985, which rules out a few of the answer choices.

While Jean Rhys is a renowned writer, she is Dominican and not African. Moreover, she was known for writing novels (including Wide Sargasso Sea and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie) and not plays.

The Sea and the Mirror is a 1958 poetry collection by W.H. Auden. Jill (1946), High Windows (1974), The Less Deceived (1955), and All What Jazz (1970) are all by the prolific Philip Larkin.

In 1997, Rich declined the National Medal of Arts in order to protest a proposition to cut government funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and other government policies.

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth was published in 2007.

Meditations in an Emergency (1957)is Frank O’Hara’s third collection. The title is allegedly an allusion to a work by the English poet John Donne.

Kenneth Koch wrote Thank You and Other Poems (1962), John Ashbery wrote Your Name Here (2000), William S. Burroughs wrote Junky (1953), and Denis Jonson wrote Jesus' Son (1992).

Along with Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara was an important member of the New York School and contributed greatly to its surrealist, abstract expressionist, and avant-garde aesthetic.

Meditations in an Emergency was published in 1957.

This collection was first published in 1957.

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a 1917 poem by Wallace Stevens.

All of the other answer choices were published in Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency (1957).

Inspired by a newspaper misprint, “The Man-Moth” (1946) is a poem by the U.S. Poet Laureate Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar (1963), Amy Lowell wrote Ballads for Sale (1927), and Frank O’Hara wrote Oranges: 12 pastorals (1953).

Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring is Bishop’s 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection. The rest are the titles of individual poems by Octavio Paz.

The Striders (1966)is a collection of poetry by the writer and translator A. K. Ramanujan.

Paul Yoon wrote Once the Shore (2009), Jhumpa Lahiri wrote The Namesake (2003), Maxine Hong Kingston wrote Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and Hanya Yanagihara wrote The People in the Trees (2013)

A. K. Ramanujan is an Indian writer. He was born in Mysuru in the state of Karnataka, India.

The Striders was published in 1966.

Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy are all Indian writers. Marjane Satrapi is a French-Iranian writer and graphic novelist.

The Striders was published in 1966.

The Striders was first published in 1966, making it one of A. K. Ramanujan’s earlier collections. (The poet lived from 1929 to 1993.)

The only one of these novels not set in a fictional dystopia is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, an incredibly experimental work that vaguely follows various characters through a dreamlike, nebulous plot.

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).