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Indian Civil Service Exams (CSE) Syllabus - UPSC Exams

UPSC Exmas Indian Civil Services Syllabus for Mains Exams : English

The syllabus consists of two papers, designed to test a firsthand and critical reading of texts prescribed from the following periods in English Literature: Paper I : 16001900 and Paper II : 19001990.

There will be two compulsory questions in each paper: a) A shortnotes question related to the topics for general study, and b) A critical analysis of UNSEEN passages both in prose and verse.

Paper-I

Answers must be written in English.

Texts for detailed study are listed below. Candidates will also be required to show adequate knowledge of the following topics and movements :

The Renaissance : Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama; Metaphysical Poetry; The Epic and the Mockepic; Neoclassicism; Satire; The Romantic Movement; The Rise of the Novel; The Victorian Age.

Section-A

• William Shakespeare : King Lear and The Tempest.
• John Donne. The following poems :
  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. The following poems:
  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

Answers must be written in English.

Texts for detailed study are listed below. Candidates will also be required to show adequate knowledge of the following topics and movements :

Modernism; Poets of the Thirties; The streamofconsciousness Novel; Absurd Drama; Colonialism and PostColonialism; Indian Writing in English; Marxist, Psychoanalytical and Feminist approaches to literature; PostModernism.

Section-A

• William Butler Yeats. The following poems:
  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 following poems :
  The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
  Journey of the Magi.
  Burnt Norton.
• W.H. Auden. The following poems :
  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. The following poems:
  Next
  Please
  Deceptions
  Afternoons
  Days
  Mr. Bleaney
• A.K. Ramanujan. The following poems:
  Looking for a Causim on a Swing
  A River
  Of Mothers, among other Things
  Love Poem for a Wife 1
  SamllScale Reflections on a Great House
  Obituary

(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.

Indian Civil Service Exams (CSE) Syllabus - UPSC Exams