Contexts of British Prose - AP English Literature and Composition

The Remains of the Day was published in 1989, and it won the Booker Prize that same year. It is Kazuo Ishiguro’s third novel.

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.

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He moved to England with his family when he was five years old and is considered an English author.

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.

Clarissa is an epistolary novel, or a novel written in the form of a series of letters. The story centers on its eponymous heroine and her tragic attempts to break free from her family’s conniving and preserve her honor.

British author Horace Walpole is widely considered the progenitor of the Gothic style, which is characterized by its mix of horror, romanticism, and macabre excess. Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto is usually described as the first work in this genre, although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’ unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” are all more widely known works of Gothic literature.

Frankenstein investigates insanity in its probing of Dr. Frankenstein’s mental state; it investigates both secrecy and the nature of knowledge in its portrayal of the guilt and fear Dr. Frankenstein feels when he discovers but does not disclose powerful new information; and it investigates aesthetics when it contrasts the beautiful (various female characters) with the hideous (the monster). Politics is the only theme that does not play a major role in the novel.

Northanger Abbey is a parodic Gothic novel.

Written in 1899, this classic and semi-autobiographical novella follows the adventures of the anti-hero Marlow up the Congo River as he seeks the ivory trader Kurtz. It examines issues such as racism, colonialism, madness, illness, and civilization.

Never Let Me Go (2005), The Buried Giant (2015), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and The Unconsoled (1995) are all by Kazuo Ishiguro. The Inheritance of Loss (2006) is by Kiran Desai.

This passage is adapted from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859).

_Great Expectation_s (1891) is by Charles Dickens, _Wuthering Height_s (1847) is by Emily Brontë, Middlemarch (1874) is by George Eliot, and Pride and Prejudice (1813) is by Jane Austen.

A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’ novel, published in weekly installments in 1859.

Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights (1847), and Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891).

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is set in London and Paris immediately before and during the French Revolution (1775 and 1792).

Ebenezer Scrooge is a main character in Charles Dickens’ 1843 novel A Christmas Carol. All the others are primary characters in A Tale of Two Cities.

(Passage adapted from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, (1859))