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Exploring the Novel: A Comprehensive Quiz on Literary History

This quiz explores various aspects of the novel, including authors, historical context, and significant works that have shaped literary history.

#literature #novels #literary history #famous authors #book culture

1 What does the following picture show?  Madame de Pompadour spending her afternoon with a book, 1756 – religious and scientific reading has a different iconography.   Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and Shimon Peres, New York City, 2008   New novels in a Berlin bookshop, March 2009   Berlin, May 10, 1933, Nazi book burning.

2 Cambridge: ________ Press.

3 ________'s prose fictions had appeared as "novels" in the 1680s and were reprinted in collections of her works which turned the scandalous authoress into a modern classic.

4 The term novel – today in a twisted history (see below) connected with the appearance of ________'s Robinson Crusoe (1719) – has been present on the market since the 16th century.

5 ________'s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767) rejected continuous narration.

6 The 19th-century ________ became the arena of such explorations of personal developments that separated the individual from, and then reunited it with, his or her social environment.

7 Crossovers into other genres – the novel as film, the film as novel, the amalgam of the novel and the ________ that led to the evolution of the graphic novel – have strengthened the genre's influence on the collective imagination and the arena of ongoing debates.

8 The events of World War II found their reflections in novels from Günter Grass' The Tin Drum (1959) to Joseph Heller's ________ (1961).

9 The new theorists' claim that art could never be original, that it always played with existing materials, that language basically recalled itself had been an accepted truth in the world of ________.

10 Works of the Chanson de geste tradition revived the memory of ancient Thebes, Dido and ________, and Alexander the Great.

💡 Interesting Facts

  • in spite of their poor formal education, William Tinsley and his brother Edward founded the Victorian publishing firm Tinsley Brothers, which brought out Thomas Hardy's first novels.
  • in 1944, Gwethalyn Graham was the first Canadian writer to reach number one on The New York Times bestseller list, with a novel depicting an interfaith romance between a Protestant woman and a Jewish man.
  • only three novels catering to soldiers' sexual proclivities during the American Civil War are known to still exist.
  • openly gay novelist Gordon Merrick's book The Lord Won't Mind spent 16 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in 1970, at a time when most authors would not write about homosexual themes for a mass audience.
  • poorly written Regency romance novels can often be identified by their incorrect use of styles and titles of peers.
  • even though Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, it reached an even wider audience in its theatrical adaptations (advertising poster pictured).
  • as a teenager, Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhaylovich Reshetnikov (pictured) was convicted of stealing mail and sentenced to three months in a monastery.
  • The Vampyre was a short novel first published on April 1, 1819 in parts in the New Monthly Magazine with the false attribution "A Tale by Lord Byron".
  • Nick Burd's debut novel The Vast Fields of Ordinary was a New York Times "notable book" for 2009 and won the Stonewall Book Award in the Children's and Young Adult Literature category.
  • a theme in Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land is group marriage.
  • as "the first novel with a thesis", Patronage by Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, published in 1814, opened the way for the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott.
  • the 1937 Western fiction book Buckskin Brigades was Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's first published novel.
  • the donkey that inspired the novel and film Brighty of the Grand Canyon is memorialized at Grand Canyon National Park by a statue and an historic landmark.
  • the Literary Review said of a novel by Daisy Waugh "Cold Comfort Farm meets Goodbye, Mr. Chips".
  • the Viagens Interplanetarias series of science fiction stories by L. Sprague de Camp was influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian novels.
  • the events in the novel The Dig take place during the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, England.
  • the killing of a gay Marvel superhero by Wolverine led to the creation of the novel Hero, whose protagonist is a gay teenager.
  • the massacre of the Acqui Division provided the historical context for the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which later became a Hollywood film.
  • the science fiction novel Typewriter in the Sky by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is set in the Caribbean during the 17th century.
  • the novel Final Blackout by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is seen as an early classic of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
  • the novels of Jane Austen (pictured) became popular with the public only after the publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869.
  • the parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies combines Jane Austen's 1813 classic, Pride and Prejudice, with elements of zombie fiction.
  • the protagonist of Alexandre Dumas' recently rediscovered last novel The Knight of Sainte-Hermine has a pivotal encounter with the British admiral Horatio Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar.
  • State of War is the debut novel written in 1988 by award-winning Filipino author Ninotchka Rosca.
  • Sin has been described as the most controversial and most bohemian among F. Sionil José’s novels because it created an “artifice of sexual tension”.
  • Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard composed the music for Space Jazz – a concept album companion to his science fiction novel Battlefield Earth.
  • Reginald Hill's novel "A Clubbable Woman" was his first story about Dalziel and Pascoe.
  • Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's SF novel To the Stars was nominated for a 2001 "Retro" Hugo Award.
  • Singaporean author Rex Shelley wrote his first novel The Shrimp People, about the Eurasian community in Singapore, in 1991 at age 61.
  • American film director Keith Gordon decided to adapt the novel of obsessive passion, Waking the Dead, into a movie before he finished reading it.
  • Peter Benchley wanted to write about pirates, but editor Thomas Congdon preferred his idea for a novel about sharks that became the bestseller Jaws.
  • novelist Charles Dickens received news of the death in India of his son Walter Landor Dickens on his own birthday on February 7, 1864.
  • Alistair Beaton predicted the flooding of New Orleans in his 2004 satirical novel A Planet for the President.
  • Charles Dickens wrote his novels Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities at his Tavistock House home.
  • F. Sionil José's Viajero (The Wanderer) is a novel about a Filipino boy adopted by an African-American soldier.
  • Jacek Dukaj's Black Oceans, a Polish science-fiction novel, received the Janusz A. Zajdel Award Polish award for sci-fi literature in 2001.
  • American novelist Tracy Quan once served as spokeswoman to the sex worker advocacy group Prostitutes of New York.
  • Augustus Dickens, the brother of English novelist Charles Dickens, abandoned his blind wife in London and ran away to America with another woman.
  • Breakfast in the Ruins is the second novel by Michael Moorcock to feature Karl Glogauer as its protagonist, the other being Behold the Man.
  • Chemmeen, a popular Malayalam novel, was made into a colour Cinemascope film, one of the first in Malayalam film industry.
  • Other Songs, an award winning novel by Jacek Dukaj, a Polish science fiction writer, describes a unique world in which the ideas of Aristotle and Hegel replace the laws of physics.
  • Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood, a classic Australian novel, hasn't been out of print since it was edited into a single volume in 1889.
  • Sydney Dickens, the son of novelist Charles Dickens, accumulated so much debt that his father refused to see him.
  • Samuel Green was jailed in 1857 for possessing a copy of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
  • Jack Agnew, a PFC member of the Filthy Thirteen World War II parachute regiment, loosely inspired the novel and film The Dirty Dozen.
  • Kermit Roosevelt III, author of the 2005 legal thriller In the Shadow of the Law, is the great-great-grandson of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.
  • Nicolas des Escuteaux's novels are regarded as more adventurous than sentimental, and show the influence of the Renaissance Hispano-Portuguese adventure novel.
  • Prathapa Mudaliar Charithram was the first novel in Tamil.
  • 49 of Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel Quddous's novels have had film adaptations.
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