Unit quiz: The sentence as a claim: style, figure and persona in prose

Check understanding, separately from reading

5 questions · 80% to pass · no timer. This quiz checks the lessons in this unit. These authored questions assess recognition and application of the taught distinctions, not professional qualification. You may review the lessons and retry. Repeat attempts reuse the question bank; a remembered answer is not proof of transfer to a new situation.

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Question 1

A student annotating Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare marks the sentence “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature” as a polite concession and moves on. A tutor asks what the sentence is doing in its paragraph, which has just granted that Shakespeare’s mixed drama breaks the rules. Which description of the sentence’s work is best supported?It is the hinge of the argument: having conceded the breach of rule, Johnson transfers authority from critics to nature, so the concession becomes the ground of a defence rather than an apologyIt is a courteous aside, since Johnson immediately returns to the rules and never mentions nature again in the Preface

Question 2

A review describes Gibbon as a straightforwardly devout historian whose fifteenth chapter merely reports the growth of the church, and quotes “a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men” as evidence of piety. What is wrong with the use of that quotation?Nothing is wrong, because an author’s ironic intention cannot be established from prose and quotations must be read literallyThe phrasing is doing ironic work that the review suppresses: the sentence continues into military and botanical figures (“derived new vigor from opposition”, “erected the triumphant banner”), and the chapter’s own “obvious but satisfactory answer” is withdrawn two sentences later

Question 3

An essay submitted on Paine’s Crisis No. I says the opening is powerful because it is “raw, spontaneous feeling dashed off in a crisis”. The student points to the capitals in “THESE” and “FREEDOM” as marks of unrevised emotion. How should the claim be corrected?The opening is a designed piece of prose: a maxim in the first sentence, a coined compound (“summer soldier”) that names a social type, a price metaphor, and a pivot on “but”, all of which are repeatable techniques rather than symptoms of hasteThe capitals prove the opposite, since eighteenth-century printers capitalised nouns mechanically and the passage therefore carries no emphasis at all

Question 4

A reader concludes from “I like to go by myself” that Hazlitt was a solitary man and that the essay is therefore a reliable record of his habits, while a second reader concludes that because the essay is a performance, nothing in it can be believed. Which assessment of the pair is best?The first reader is right, since first-person essays are autobiographical by definition, and the second reader is over-readingBoth readers mistake a constructed persona for a person or for a lie: the essay builds a speaker by selection and antithesis, and the biographical question is separate from the question of what the persona is made to argue

Question 5

An editor proposes to cut Thackeray’s “Before the Curtain” from a school edition on the ground that it delays the story and expresses opinions the novel later undermines. Which objection is strongest?The preface installs the puppet-show frame that the final chapter closes, so cutting it removes the device by which the novel measures its own characters and hands judgement to the readerThe preface should be kept because prefaces are authorial documents and no editor may alter the contents of a novel

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