Language & Literature · Unit 18

Literary Theory and Criticism

How scholars read, argue about and interpret texts

Literary theory asks what reading is and what a text even is, and its answers determine which questions about a book are worth asking.

The unit covers formalism and New Criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism, narratology and reader-response, Marxist and feminist criticism, and postcolonial criticism.

This unit breaks down into 22 short steps and 132 questions, starting at difficulty 4 and building to 5. Below you can see exactly what it covers, how the path is structured, and worked examples with explanations.

Steps: 22
Questions: 132
Difficulty: 4-5

What this unit covers

Narratology and Reader-Response
Postcolonial Criticism
Formalism and New Criticism
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism
Marxist and Feminist Criticism

Where this fits

The final unit in the track. Needs Classic Literature and World Literature.

Where people slip

These approaches are lenses rather than competitors to be ranked. A Marxist and a feminist reading of the same novel can both be good and can both be answering different questions.

How the unit is structured

Literary Theory and Criticism runs as 22 short steps that unlock in order. 16 are practice rounds and 6 are challenge rounds that pull together everything before them. Questions start at difficulty 4 and climb to 5 as you progress.

Step 1 · easierStep 22 · harder

Challenge rounds

Example questions

30 real questions from this unit, with the answer and the reason behind it, grouped by what they practise. There are 132 in the unit altogether.

Formalism and New Criticism

Build the sentenceLevel 4
1. Build a sentence that states the New Critical view of a poem.
Answer: New Criticism reads the poem as an autonomous verbal object
For the New Critics the poem stands on its own as a made verbal object.
Choose all that applyLevel 4
2. Which of these are typical of New Criticism? Pick all that apply.
- Close reading of the words on the pagecorrect
- Attention to irony, paradox and ambiguity
- Treating the poem as a self-sufficient wholecorrect
- Explaining the poem through the author's letters and diaries
New Criticism prizes close reading, tension and unity in the text, and sets biography aside.
Fill the blankLevel 4
3. Cleanth Brooks called the reduction of a poem to a prose summary the heresy of ____.
- paraphrasecorrect
- allegory
- metre
- ambiguity
In "The Well Wrought Urn" (1947) Brooks argued that a poem's meaning cannot be separated from its exact wording.
Match the pairsLevel 4
4. Match each formalist critic to the work they wrote.
Answer: Cleanth Brooks = The Well Wrought Urn; William Empson = Seven Types of Ambiguity; I. A. Richards = Practical Criticism; Viktor Shklovsky = Art as Technique
These four works are foundational statements of New Criticism and Russian Formalism.
Multiple choiceLevel 4
5. What did Wimsatt and Beardsley call the error of judging a literary work by the author's stated intention?
- The intentional fallacycorrect
- The affective fallacy
- The pathetic fallacy
- The heresy of paraphrase
They named it the intentional fallacy, arguing that a writer's declared aim is neither available nor decisive for judging the finished text.
Odd one outLevel 4
6. Which of these critics is NOT usually linked to Russian Formalism?
- Cleanth Brookscorrect
- Viktor Shklovsky
- Roman Jakobson
- Boris Eichenbaum
Cleanth Brooks was an American New Critic, while the other three were leading Russian Formalists.

Marxist and Feminist Criticism

Choose all that applyLevel 4
7. Which of these writers are feminist critics or theorists? Pick all that apply.
- Elaine Showaltercorrect
- Sandra Gilbertcorrect
- Judith Butlercorrect
- Cleanth Brooks
Showalter, Gilbert and Butler are central feminist thinkers, while Cleanth Brooks was a New Critic.
Fact or fibLevel 4
8. Marxist criticism treats literature as completely separate from the economic conditions that produced it.
Answer: False
Marxist critics do the opposite, reading texts as shaped by class, labour and the conditions of production.
Fill the blankLevel 4
9. Antonio Gramsci used the term ____ for rule kept in place by consent and culture rather than by force.
- hegemonycorrect
- alienation
- reification
- dialectic
Hegemony names the way a ruling group wins agreement, which is why culture matters so much to Marxist critics.
Match the pairsLevel 4
10. Match each theorist to the concept they are known for.
Answer: Louis Althusser = Interpellation; Antonio Gramsci = Hegemony; Judith Butler = Gender performativity; Laura Mulvey = The male gaze
Each of these terms entered criticism through the thinker named beside it.
Build the sentenceLevel 5
11. Build the sentence that sums up the Marxist view of literature.
Answer: Marxist critics read literature as a product of history
Marxist critics treat a text as shaped by the material history and class relations that produced it.
Guess the numberLevel 5
12. In which year did Virginia Woolf publish "A Room of One's Own"?
Answer: 1929 year
It appeared in 1929, arguing that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction.

Narratology and Reader-Response

Fact or fibLevel 4
13. The term unreliable narrator was coined by Roland Barthes.
Answer: False
It was Wayne Booth who introduced the term in "The Rhetoric of Fiction" in 1961.
Fill the blankLevel 4
14. In Genette's terms, a narrative that jumps back to an earlier event uses ____.
- analepsiscorrect
- prolepsis
- ellipsis
- metalepsis
Analepsis is the technical name for a flashback, and prolepsis is its forward-looking twin.
Match the pairsLevel 4
15. Match each reader-focused critic to the book they wrote.
Answer: Wolfgang Iser = The Act of Reading; Hans Robert Jauss = Toward an Aesthetic of Reception; Stanley Fish = Is There a Text in This Class?; Wayne Booth = The Rhetoric of Fiction
These four books shaped how criticism thinks about the reader's part in making meaning.
Multiple choiceLevel 4
16. In Gerard Genette's narratology, what does focalization describe?
- The perspective through which events are presentedcorrect
- How long the telling of an event lasts
- The order in which events are told
- How often an event is narrated
Focalization is the perspective that filters the story, separating who sees from who speaks.
Build the sentenceLevel 5
17. Build a sentence that explains Iser's idea of the implied reader.
Answer: The implied reader is a role the text invites us to fill
The implied reader is not a real person but a position the text sets up for whoever reads it.
Guess the numberLevel 5
18. How many narrative functions did Vladimir Propp identify in his study of Russian folktales?
Answer: 31 functions
Propp reduced a hundred folktales to 31 recurring functions that always appear in the same order.

Postcolonial Criticism

Build the sentenceLevel 4
19. Build a sentence that states what postcolonial critics study.
Answer: Postcolonial critics ask how empire shaped literature and identity
Postcolonial criticism traces the long effects of empire on writing and on who people take themselves to be.
Choose all that applyLevel 4
20. Which of these books were written by Frantz Fanon? Pick all that apply.
- Black Skin, White Masks
- The Wretched of the Earthcorrect
- Orientalism
- Decolonising the Mind
Fanon wrote "Black Skin, White Masks" and "The Wretched of the Earth"; the others are by Said and Ngugi.
Guess the numberLevel 4
21. In which year was Edward Said's "Orientalism" first published?
Answer: 1978 year
It appeared in 1978 and is usually treated as the founding text of postcolonial criticism.
Fact or fibLevel 5
22. Said's "Orientalism" argues that Western writing produced the East as an exotic Other in order to govern it.
Answer: True
True: for Said, knowledge of the Orient and power over it grew together.
Fill the blankLevel 5
23. Gayatri Spivak's best known essay asks "Can the ____ Speak?"
- Subalterncorrect
- Novelist
- Narrator
- Colonist
The subaltern is the colonized group whose voice the historical record has left out.
Multiple choiceLevel 5
24. Which term from Homi Bhabha describes colonial imitation that is "almost the same, but not quite"?
- Mimicrycorrect
- Hegemony
- Catharsis
- Defamiliarization
Mimicry both copies and unsettles colonial authority, because the copy is never allowed to be identical.

Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

Fact or fibLevel 4
25. Saussure argued that the link between a signifier and its signified is arbitrary rather than natural.
Answer: True
Nothing about the sounds of the word dog resembles a dog, which is exactly Saussure's point.
Guess the numberLevel 4
26. How many recurring narrative functions did Vladimir Propp identify in Russian folktales?
Answer: 31 functions
In Morphology of the Folktale, Propp reduced the tales to 31 functions that always occur in the same order.
Build the sentenceLevel 5
27. Build the sentence that states Derrida's claim about meaning.
Answer: Derrida argued that meaning is always deferred
For Derrida meaning is never fully present; it is endlessly deferred along a chain of signs.
Choose all that applyLevel 5
28. Which statements express post-structuralist positions? Pick all that apply.
- Meaning is unstable and endlessly deferredcorrect
- Texts contain contradictions that undo their own claimscorrect
- Binary oppositions hide a hierarchy that can be overturnedcorrect
- Each text has one fixed meaning guaranteed by its author
Post-structuralism treats meaning as unstable and shows how texts undermine the very oppositions they rely on.
Fill the blankLevel 5
29. Derrida's reading practice, which shows how a text undoes its own hierarchies and claims, is called ____.
- deconstructioncorrect
- philology
- hermeneutics
- stylistics
Deconstruction works from inside a text, exposing the contradictions that unsettle its apparent argument.
Multiple choiceLevel 5
30. Derrida's coined term "differance" plays on which double sense of the French verb differer?
- To differ and to defercorrect
- To repeat and to erase
- To speak and to write
- To name and to number
Differance fuses differing and deferring: signs mean by differing from other signs and by putting off any final meaning.

Where these questions come from. Each unit starts as a plan of the concepts it should cover and the difficulty it should span. Questions are written against that plan with AI assistance, then checked by a validator that rejects anything without a single defensible answer, an explanation, or plausible wrong options. How we write questions sets out the whole process, and corrections are fixed in the bank and reach the site and the app the same day.

How you practise

This unit mixes 14 different question formats, so you are recalling and applying rather than recognising the same layout every time.

Build the sentence
Choose all that apply
Fact or fib
Fill the blank
Guess the number
Match the pairs
Multiple choice
Odd one out
Picture question
Put in order
Sort into groups
Spell it
True or false
Type the answer

Practise Literary Theory and Criticism

132 questions across 22 steps. Start with step one and crawl at your own pace.

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Read about Literary Theory and Criticism

Explainers from our blog on what this unit covers. Each one ends with real questions from the bank.

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