Literature-In-English Exam Past Questions and Answers | JAMB, WAEC and NECO

Literature in English is the study of works written in the English language. It includes all forms of writing, such as novels, plays, short stories, and poetry. This subject involves exploring and analyzing these texts to understand their themes and meanings.

• Question 11: These question are based on selected poems from Ker, D.et al (eds.)New poetry from Africa; Soyinka, (ed.): Poems of Black Africa; Senanu K.E. and Vincent, T.(eds.): A Selection of African poetry;Umukoro, M et al (eds.): Exam focus:Literature in English: Eruvbetine, A.E.et al (eds): Longman Examination Guide and Nwoga, D.I. (eds.): West African Verse.The poet persona in Marvell's To His Coy Mistress is willing to praise the ladies eyes for Options:
  A) six decades
  B) two centuries
  C) a century
  D) thirty thousand years
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is D .
• Question 12:

  This question is based on Amma Darko's Faceless.'Ordaley ignored the two young women plating their hair because she didn't want to generate another war with a simple greeting'

  The image depicted in the lines above is

  Options:
  A) ironic
  B) personification
  C) hyperbolic
  D) metaphoric
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is C .
• Question 13: The dominant literary device in Diop's Vanity is Options:
  A) rhetorical question
  B) allusion
  C) hyperbole
  D) dramatic irony
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is A .
• Question 14: This question is based on William Shakesphere's Othello."...Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds. By what you see them act. Is there not charms. By which the property of youth and maidhood May be abused?....." The speaker in the excerpt above addresses _______? Options:
  A) Othello
  B) Lago
  C) Brabantio
  D) Roderigo
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is C .
• Question 15:

  This question is based on General Literary Principles

  The writing convention in which the events in a narrative are scrambled as they come to the writer's mind without any attempt to arrange them in orderly sequence is called

  Options:
  A) shifting style
  B) narrator's mind style
  C) psycho-consciousness style
  D) stream of consciousness
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is D .
• Question 16: This question is based on Ahmed Yerima's Attahiru.
  How does Lugard describe the battle between the white man and the Sokoto Caliphate? Options:
  A) One between superior and inferior powers
  B) One of life and death
  C) One between Christians and Muslims
  D) One of the superiority of wills
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is A .
• Question 17:

  This question is based on General Literary Principles and Literary Appreciation.In the morning Benjamin complained of a headache; at noon he collapsed; by midnight he was as dead and cold as a stone.

  The dominant literary device in the above statement is

  Options:
  A) simile
  B) epigram
  C) climax
  D) anticlimax
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is C .
• Question 18: In Mine Boy Peter Abrahams is of the view that apartheid would cease to exist in South Africa if Options:
  A) the blacks forced out the whites
  B) the whites packed their bags and went away peacefully
  C) the whites became more generous and gentle to the blacks
  D) black and whites stopped regarding people primarily by the colour of the skin
  E) unequal treatment of the black and white at the mines was discontinued.
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is D .
• Question 19:

  This question is based on selected poems from R. Johnson and D. Ker et al (eds.): New Poetry from Africa : Wole Soyinka (ed.): Poems of Black Africa; K.E. Senanu and T. Vincent (eds.): A selection of African Poetry and E.W.Parker (ed.): A Pageant of Longer Poems.

  The villains in this poem by Osundara are

  Options:
  A) the beggars sprawled in gutters
  B) those who squander the wealth of the earth
  C) the thousands buried alive
  D) the people who die in abandon
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is D .
• Question 20:

  This question is based on General Literature Principles and Literary Appreciation

  'I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun

  My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;

  But swear by thyself, that at my death thy sun

  Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;

  And, having done that, thou hast done,

  I fear no more.'

  These lines from John Donne's 'Hymn to God the Father' contain examples of

  Options:
  A) pun
  B) personification
  C) hyperbole
  D) quibble
  Show Answer
  The correct answer is C .