English Notes for Assistant Professor






TRB Assistant Professor Notes – English Unit 2: British Drama, Fiction & Short Story


English – Unit 2: British Drama, Fiction & Short Story

Comprehensive, original notes shaped for the TRB Assistant Professor exam: period overview → forms & techniques → author spotlights → exam frames → MCQs.

Elizabethan to PostmodernPlot Patterns & GenresKey Terms & DevicesModel Answers
Drama Map
Fiction Map
Short Story Traditions
Critical Terms
Author Spotlights
MCQs
Answer Frames
15-Minute Revision

1) British Drama – Period Map & Quick Traits

PeriodCore FeaturesRepresentative Playwrights/PlaysExam Hooks
Medieval → TudorMorality & Mystery plays; allegorical figures (Everyman, Vice); episodic scenes.Everyman; cycles (York, Chester).Allegory + Salvation Plot
Elizabethan/Jacobean (c. 1580–1642)Blank verse; mix of high/low; revenge and city comedies; public theatres.Marlowe (Faustus), Shakespeare, Webster (Duchess of Malfi), Jonson (Volpone).Tragic Hero + Overreacher; Humours Theory
Restoration (1660–1700)Comedy of Manners; wit repartee; libertine rake vs. fop; proscenium staging; actresses on stage.Wycherley (The Country Wife), Congreve (The Way of the World).Wit, Intrigue, Fashion
18th c.Sentimental comedy vs. anti-sentimental revival; moral purpose resurfaces.Steele (The Conscious Lovers), Goldsmith (She Stoops…), Sheridan (The School for Scandal).Laughing vs. Sentimental Debate
VictorianSocial problem plays; well-made play structure; aesthetic wit at fin-de-siècle.T. W. Robertson; Pinero; Oscar Wilde (Importance of Being Earnest).Well-Made Play Mechanics
Modern–PostwarRealism & naturalism; Theatre of the Absurd; working-class anger.Shaw, Synge; Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Pinter, Osborne, Arden, Bond, Stoppard.Silence, Pause, Circularity
Spot-the-period trick: glittering epigrams → Restoration; moral tears → Sentimental; pauses & menace → Pinter.

2) British Fiction – Evolution & Architectures

PhaseNarrative FeaturesKey NovelistsRemember
Origins (18th c.)Rise of the individual; epistolary & picaresque; plain style.Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne.Empirical detail + moral experiment
Gothic/RomanceRuins, doubles, sublime terror; female confinement motifs.Horace Walpole, Radcliffe, Mary Shelley.Atmosphere drives plot
Austen & the Domestic RealistFree indirect style; courtship economy; irony as ethics.Jane Austen.Sense vs. Sensibility matrix
Victorian Social NovelSerial publication; multiplot; city as network; omniscient narrator.Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, Trollope; Brontës; George Eliot; Hardy.Character web + moral testing
ModernismStream of consciousness; unreliable focalization; time as subjective.Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (influence), D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford.Interior over event
Post-1945Metafiction; historiographic play; moral ambiguity; immigrant voices.Greene, Golding, Murdoch, Fowles, Amis, Rushdie, Ishiguro, Zadie Smith.Form as argument
Essential Plot Patterns (quick-recognition)
  • Bildungsroman: growth-from-ignorance arc (e.g., David Copperfield).
  • Condition-of-England novel: society diagnosed (e.g., Hard Times).
  • Novella: concentrated single effect; moral fable (Conrad, Stevenson).
  • Campus/Academic novel: satire of institutions (Amis, Lodge).

3) Short Story in Britain – Lineage & Technique

Lineage

  • Romance & Gothic tales → magazine culture (19th c.).
  • Classic exponents: Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells.
  • Modernist compression: Katherine Mansfield, Woolf.
  • Postwar irony & twist: Somerset Maugham, Saki, Roald Dahl.

Technique

  • Epiphany (sudden illumination) and Chekhovian open ending.
  • Economy of detail; single setting; limited time span.
  • Motif webs (objects, colors) to carry theme.

Exam cue: Identify one governing device (e.g., framing narrator in Conan Doyle; sensory leitmotif in Mansfield) and relate it to theme in two lines.

4) Critical Terms You Must Command

  • Comedy of Manners: urbane wit targeting social pretence; intricate intrigue plots.
  • Sentimental Comedy: appeals to tears and virtue; reformed rake ending.
  • Well-Made Play: careful exposition, quiproquo, letters/props as pivots, obligatory scene.
  • Stream of Consciousness: unfiltered mental flux; interior monologue and free indirect discourse.
  • Free Indirect Style: third-person narration colored by character’s idiom (Austen, Eliot).
  • Unreliable Narrator: narrator whose account is limited or biased; reader reconstructs truth.
  • Defamiliarization: making the familiar strange to renew perception (modernist strategy).

5) Author Spotlights – exam-length capsules

William Shakespeare – stage of the nation
  • Elastic blank verse → shifts to prose for social/psychological register.
  • Comedies balance wit with restorative endings; tragedies probe fatal choice & political order.
  • Problem plays complicate genre (e.g., Measure for Measure).
Ben Jonson – Classical laughter & the Humours
  • Satiric comedies built on a ruling “humour” (Volpone, Subtle, Sir Epicure Mammon).
  • Plain style, moral purpose, city topography as character.
Congreve & Sheridan – From manners to gossip
  • Congreve perfects repartee & legal-contract marriage plot (Way of the World).
  • Sheridan weaponizes rumor and screen scenes (School for Scandal).
Jane Austen – Free indirect irony
  • Narrative filters through heroine’s sensibility; irony disciplines desire.
  • Economy & estate structures produce conflict; endings recalibrate judgment.
Charles Dickens – Serial city
  • Caricature + pathos; multiplot braids; institutions personified.
  • Openings & cliffhangers shaped by serialization; social critique embedded in melodrama.
George Eliot – Ethical realism
  • Sympathetic imagination; causality as moral web (Middlemarch).
  • Narrator converses with reader; provincial life scaled to universal choices.
Hardy – Tragedy in pastoral
  • Impersonal fate + social convention; nature as indifferent witness.
  • Architectural plotting (irony of circumstance); rustic chorus voices.
Virginia Woolf – The mind’s tide
  • Moments of being; lighthouse/party structures replace linear plot.
  • Perspective mosaics; lyrical syntax; time as felt duration.
Graham Greene & Golding – Postwar conscience
  • Greene’s entertainments with moral pressure; Catholic guilt as engine.
  • Golding’s parables of fallen nature (Lord of the Flies), allegory without safety nets.

6) Practice MCQs (keys included)

  1. The comedy of manners chiefly belongs to the:

    Answer: Restoration period.
  2. Which one is a hallmark of the well-made play?

    Answer: A crucial letter/prop triggers the obligatory scene.
  3. Free indirect discourse is most associated with:

    Answer: Jane Austen (and later George Eliot).
  4. Whose drama exemplifies the Theatre of the Absurd?

    Answer: Samuel Beckett.
  5. Which novel type diagnoses society’s industrial ills?

    Answer: Condition-of-England novel.

7) Long Answer Frames – expand during exam

Q: Compare Laughing Comedy and Sentimental Comedy in the 18th century.
  1. Intro: Post-Restoration debate about moral function of laughter.
  2. Sentimental: Steele’s humane tears; virtue rewarded; reformed rake; pathos heavy; risk → dullness.
  3. Laughing (revivalists): Goldsmith & Sheridan; wit exposes folly; energy, disguise, scandal sheets.
  4. Dramaturgy: sentimental uses recognition & moral speeches; laughing uses eavesdropping, screen scenes, epigrams.
  5. Conclusion: British stage balances moral instruction with comic vitality—revivalists win longevity.
Q: “Victorian novel is a social organism.” Discuss with examples.
  1. Serial form → networks of characters and settings; narrator as civic guide.
  2. Dickens (city systems), Eliot (ethical cause-effect), Gaskell (industrial conflict), Hardy (custom vs. individual).
  3. Techniques: multiplot, recurring motifs, public scenes (trials, elections).
  4. Outcome: form models community; critique and hope share space.
Q: Modernist fiction replaces event with consciousness. Explain.
  1. Historical shocks; need for new representation.
  2. Stream of consciousness; time-shift; montage; symbolic patterning.
  3. Close with Woolf’s “moments of being” vs. plot-driven Victorian narrative.

8) 15-Minute Revision Sheet

Drama → one-liners

  • Marlowe = overreacher tragedy.
  • Jonson = humours + city satire.
  • Congreve = contract & repartee.
  • Sheridan = gossip as plot engine.
  • Wilde = paradox aesthetics.
  • Beckett = waiting as structure.

Fiction → anchors

  • Defoe/Fielding = foundational realism.
  • Austen = free indirect irony.
  • Dickens = serial multiplicity.
  • Eliot = moral causality.
  • Woolf = interior time.
  • Rushdie/Ishiguro = postmodern ethics of memory.

Short Story → devices

  • Single effect; tight setting/time.
  • Epiphany / twist / frame narrator.
  • Motif webs (color/object recurring).

Common mistakes: Calling every witty play “Restoration,” misusing “stream of consciousness” for mere first-person, ignoring serial context in Victorian novel answers.
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