Matching classical and foundational critical texts to their authors:

A. Plato — (II) Symposium. A philosophical text exploring love, desire, and beauty through speeches.

B. Aristotle — (I) Rhetoric. A seminal treatise on the art of persuasion and argumentation.

C. P. B. Shelley — (IV) A Defence of Poetry. His famous Romantic essay declaring poets as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

D. Philip Sidney — (III) An Apology for Poetry. (Also known as The Defence of Poesy), a major Renaissance defense of literature's ability to teach and delight.

The English critic Thomas Rymer coined the term "poetic justice" in 1678 to describe the ideal moral balance that should occur in literature.

He argued that unlike the random, often unjust real world (ruling out C), literature should strictly adhere to decorum and morality (B). Therefore, in a play, virtue must be ultimately rewarded and vice must be proportionally punished (A). He notoriously used this concept to attack Shakespeare's Othello, complaining that Desdemona's death was unjust.

Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711) is a didactic poem outlining neoclassical literary ideals.

• (A) True: He deeply analyzes what makes contemporary critics fail (pride, poor education) while praising the classical critics of antiquity (like Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus).
• (B) True: The poem systematically characterizes what traits a "good critic" must possess (candor, modesty, good breeding, and following Nature).

Why the others are wrong: The poem is not a manual on "how to write an essay" (C, D). Additionally, it was written decades before William Wordsworth was even born, making E historically impossible.

Identifying the major works of the Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey:

• (A) Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821): His most famous autobiographical work detailing his laudanum addiction.
• (E) Suspiria de Profundis (1845): A psychological, prose-poem sequel to his Confessions, exploring dreams and the unconscious.
• (D) Autobiographic Sketches (1853): A compilation of his autobiographical writings.

Why B and C are wrong: The French Revolution was written by Thomas Carlyle. Hudibras is a 17th-century satire by Samuel Butler.

In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold divides human driving forces into two main categories: Hebraism and Hellenism.

Hellenism focuses on "seeing things as they really are" (intellectual clarity, beauty, and light). Conversely, Hebraism focuses on conduct, strict obedience, self-control, and moral education. Arnold argued that Victorian England was too heavily skewed toward the strict, puritanical rules of Hebraism and desperately needed an infusion of Hellenic "sweetness and light."

Matching major 20th-century critical and philosophical works:

A. Bertrand Russell — (III) History of Western Philosophy. His highly popular 1945 survey of philosophical thought.

B. T.S. Eliot — (IV) The Sacred Wood. His 1920 collection of critical essays (including "Tradition and the Individual Talent").

C. W.K. Wimsatt — (I) The Verbal Icon. A seminal New Criticism text containing the famous essays on the "Intentional" and "Affective" fallacies (co-authored with Monroe Beardsley).

D. Cleanth Brooks — (II) The Well Wrought Urn. A defining New Criticism book celebrating paradox and close reading in poetry.

Matching fundamental literary terms to the writers who coined or popularized them:

A. "Negative Capability" — (IV) John Keats. Defined in an 1817 letter as the capacity to accept uncertainty and mystery without reaching for logical facts.

B. "Sweetness and light" — (I) Matthew Arnold. Used in Culture and Anarchy to denote the ultimate ideals of Hellenic culture (beauty and intelligence). (Coined earlier by Jonathan Swift).

C. "Esemplastic" — (II) Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Used in Biographia Literaria to describe the primary imagination's power to shape diverse elements into a unified whole.

D. "Dissociation of Sensibility" — (III) T.S. Eliot. Used in "The Metaphysical Poets" to describe the separation of thought from emotion in 17th-century poetry.

Analyzing key texts of the New Criticism movement:

• (A) True: John Crowe Ransom wrote the highly influential essay "Criticism, Inc." arguing that criticism must become more scientific and systematic.
• (B) True: William Empson wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity, a foundational text of close reading.
• (C) True: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren co-authored Understanding Poetry, the textbook that revolutionized how poetry was taught in American universities.

Why D and E are wrong: In Search of the New Criticism is not a famous primary work by R.P. Blackmur. The New Apologists for Poetry was written by Murray Krieger, not Allen Tate.

Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were foundational figures in the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.

Through works like Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy and Williams's Culture and Society, they shifted academic focus away from "high culture" elitism. They deeply analyzed and validated working-class culture, popular media, and the everyday experiences of "the masses" as legitimate subjects of serious literary and cultural study.

The 19th-century German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher is universally credited as the founder of modern, general hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation).

Before him, hermeneutics was largely restricted to interpreting specific Biblical or legal texts. Schleiermacher expanded it into a universal science of understanding any human communication, introducing the concept of the "hermeneutic circle" (understanding the parts through the whole, and the whole through the parts).

Roland Barthes's highly influential essay collection Image, Music, Text was published in 1977 (selected and translated by Stephen Heath).

The collection contains some of Barthes's most famous post-structuralist and semiotic essays, bridging literature, visual arts, and culture. Notably, it includes the English translation of "The Death of the Author" and "Rhetoric of the Image," where he breaks down visual images into linguistic, denoted, and connoted messages.