TNPSC English Language And Literature Syllabus

Paper - I


An outline knowledge of the growth and development of English Literature from the age of Elizabeth to the POST - WAR and Post Modern period. The candidates are expected to be familiar with the major developments during this period as well as with all important literary and critical terms. Their knowledge should be tested with reference to the topics and authors mentioned below :-

Unit - 1.1
Elizabethan Poetry : Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney and Spenser
Metaphysical Poetry : Donne and Herbet

Unit - 1.2
Elizabethan Prose : Sidney, Bacon
Elizabethan Drama : Kyd, Marlow, BenJonson, Beaumont and Fletcher
Jacobean Drama : Tourneur, Shakespeare, Middleton,Webster

Unit - 1.3
Restoratrion Drama : Congerve, Vanbrugh, Farquher, Sheridan, Goldsmith

Unit - 1.4
Prose in the 17th and 18th centureis : Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, Johnson, Swift
The Perodical Essay : Addison, Steele, Goldsmith

Unit - 1.5
The Precursors of the Romatic Period : Gray, Collins,Cowper, Goldsmith, Blake, Burns
Romantic Poetry : Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron

Unit - 1.6
Victorian Poetry : Mathew Arnold, Robert Browning, Tennyson, The Pre - Rephaelites - Rosseti

Unit - 1.7
The English Noval in the 18th Century : Defoe and the Rise of the Novel, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Gothic Fiction

Unit - 1.8
The Noval in the 19th Century : Jane Austen, Walter scott, Charles Dickens Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Thackeray.
Prose in the 19th Century : Hazlitt, Charles Lamb,De- Quincey, Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman

Unit - 1.9
Modern Poetry : Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, audens, Spender.
Modern Drama : G.B. Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry
Modern Fiction : Conrad, D.H.Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
Linerary Criticism : T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, C.S.Lewis

Unit - 1.10
Post-War and Post Modern Literature Drama : Osborne, Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard
Fiction : Beckett, Golding, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing.
Poetry : Philip Larkin, Stephen Spender Ted Hughes

Paper - II

This paper will test the candidate's in-depth knowledge of the texts prescribed and their ability for critical appreciation.

Unit - 2.1
Literary Criticism : Dryden of Dramatic Poetry Coleridge - Biographia Literaria (Chapters 14-22),
Wordsworth : Preface to Lyrical Ballads Arnold: The study of Poetry T.S.
Eliot : Tradition and Individual Talent

Unit - 2.2
Shakespare : Twelth Night, Henry IV Part.I, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Julus Ceasar, As you like it.

Unit - 2.3
Milton : Paradise Lost Books I, IV, IX, Areopagitica, SamsonAgonistes,Lycidas
The Metaphysicals : Donne, "Canonization" "Ecstasic" Marvell, "his coy Mistress" "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return"

Unit - 2.4
Dryden : Absalom and Achitophel
Surft : Gulliver's Travels, The Battle of the Books
Gray : Elegy Written in a country Churchyard The Bard
Pope : Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot Rape of the lock Essay in Criticism.

Unit - 2.5
Wordsworth : Immortality Ode, Tintern Abbey
Coleridge : Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner
Keats : Ode to a Nightingale Ode on a Grecias Urn Ode to autumn
Shelley : Ode to the west wind to a skylark. Adonais

Unit - 2.6
George Eliot : Middlemarch
Thomas Hardy : Tess of the Duberuilles, Mayor of castorbridge
D.H.Law rence : Sons and Lovers

Unit - 2.7
Tennyson : Ulysses
Mathew Arnold : The Scholar Gipsy
Robert Browning : Abt Vogler
W.B. Yeats : Byzantium
T.S.Eliot : The Wasteland, Murder in the cathedral
C.B.Shaw : St.Joan
TennesseeWilliams : The Glass Menageric

Unit - 2.8
Hawthorne : The scarlet Letter
Chinua Achebe : Things Fall Apart
Wole Soyinka : The Road
Saul Bellow : Herzog

Unit - 2.9
Mulk Raj Anand : Untouchable, Coolie
Raja Rao : Kanthapura
R.K. Narayan : The Guide
Girish Karnad : Tughlaq

Unit - 2.10
Nirad Chaudhuri : Autobiography of an Unknown Indian The continent of circe
V. S. Naipaul : A House for Mr.Biswas - Bend in the River
Margaret Atwood : Surfacing
Salman Rushdie : Midnight's Children