UPSC : Civil Services Exam Paper Pattern (English)

NOTE : Answers must be written in English

Paper I

The required text is listed below. Adequate knowledge of the following topics and movements is also required:

The Renaissance: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama; Metaphysical Poetry; The Epic and the Mock-epic; Neo-classicism; Satire; The Romantic Movement; The Rise of the Novel; The Victorian Age.

Section A

• William Shakespeare:

  • King Lear

  • The Tempest

• John Donne:

  • Canonization

  • Death be not proud

  • The Good Morrow

  • On his Mistress going to bed

  • The Relic

• John Milton: Paradise Lost, I, II, IV, IX

• Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock

• William Wordsworth:

  • 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 .

• Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam

• Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House

Section B

• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

• Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

• Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

• Charles Dickens: Hard Times

• George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss

• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles

• Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Paper II

The required text is listed below. Adequate knowledge of the following topics and movements is also required:

Modernism; Poets of the Thirties; The stream-of-consciousness Novel; Absurd Drama; Colonialism and Post-Colonialism; Indian Writing in English; Marxist, Psychoanalytical and Feminist approaches to literature; Post-Modernism.

Section A

• William Butler Yeats:

  • 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 .

  • T.S. Eliot:

  • The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

  • Journey of the Magi.

  • Burnt Norton.

• W.H. Auden:

  • 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.

• John Osborne: Look Back in Anger

• Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

• Philip Larkin:

  • Next

  • Please

  • Deceptions

  • Afternoons

  • Days

  • Mr. Bleaney

• A.K. Ramanujan:

  • Looking for a Causim on a Swing

  • A River

  • Of Mothers, among other Things

  • Love Poem for a Wife 1

  • Samll-Scale Reflections on a Great House

  • Obituary

NOTE: All these poems are available in the anthology Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, edited by R. Parthasarthy, published by Oxford University Press, New Delhi ).

Section B

• Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim

• James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

• D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

• E.M. Forster: A Passage to India

• Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

• Raja Rao: Kanthapura

• V.S. Naipal: A House for Mr. Biswas