UGC NET English Literature Syllabus

by · Published · Updated

UGC NET English Literature Syllabus

The UGC NET Syllabus that is available on the official website is not comprehensive. Let’s face it, going through that syllabus does not help, rather adds to the confusion and anxiety of an aspirant. Here is detailed UGC NET Syllabus for your help.

British Literature

I. Old and Middle English (500 to 1300 AD)

  1. Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Period: Historic Background, Themes, Style
  2. Important Works of Anglo-Saxon Period
  3. Introduction to Anglo-Norman Period: Historic Background, Themes, Style
  4. Important Works of Anglo-Norman Period

II. Age of Chaucer (1300 to 1400 AD)

  1. Introduction to Chaucerian Age: Historic Background, Themes, Style
  2. Geoffrey Chaucer
  3. William Langland
  4. John Wycliffe
  5. John Mandeville
  6. John Gower
  7. Thomas Hoccleave
  8. John Lydgate

III. Age of Revival (1400 to 1550 AD)

  1. Introduction to Age of Revival: Historic Background, Themes, Style
  2. Erasmus
  3. Thomas More
  4. William Tyndale
  5. Richard Tottel
  6. Thomas Wyatt
  7. Henry Howard
  8. Roger Ascham
  9. Thomas Elyot
  10. Thomas Mallory
  11. William Dunbar

IV. Elizabethan Age (1550 to 1600 AD)

  1. Introduction to Elizabethan Age: Historic Background, Themes, Style
  2. Popular Bible Translations

POETS

  1. Edmund Spencer
  2. Thomas Sackville
  3. Philip Sidney
  4. Michael Drayton

DRAMATIST

  1. History and Background of English Theatre
  2. Early Elizabethan Plays
  3. Christopher Marlowe
  4. Robert Greene
  5. Thomas Nashe
  6. John Lyly
  7. Thomas Lodge
  8. George Peele
  9. Thomas Kyd
  10. William Shakespeare

ESSAYIST

  1. Francis Bacon
  2. Richard Hooker
  3. Walter Raleigh
  4. Richard Hacluyt
  5. Samuel Purchas
  6. John Foxe
  7. William Camden
  8. John Knox

V. Jacobean and Caroline Age (1600 to 1640)

  1. Introduction to Jacobean and Caroline Age: Historic Background, Themes, Style

DRAMATIST

  1. Ben Johnson
  2. George Chapman
  3. Beaumont and Fletcher
  4. John Webster
  5. Thomas Middleton
  6. Thomas Heywood
  7. Thomas Dekker
  8. Philip Massinger
  9. John Ford
  10. James Shirley
  11. John Marston

POETS

  1. John Donne
  2. Richard Crashaw
  3. Henry Vaughan
  4. George Herbert
  5. Andrew Marvell
  6. Abraham Cowley
  7. Thomas Carew
  8. John Suckling
  9. Richard Lovelace
  10. Robert Herrick

VI. Civil War and Interregnum (1640 to 1660)

  1. Introduction to Civil War and Interregnum: History & Background
  2. John Milton
  3. John Bunyan
  4. Robert Burton
  5. Thomas Browne
  6. Jeremy Taylor
  7. Richard Baxter
  8. Izaak Walton
  9. Thomas Fuller

VII. Restoration Age (1660 to 1700)

  1. Introduction to Restoration Age: Historic Background, Themes, Style

PROSE WRITERS

  1. John Dryden
  2. Samuel Butler
  3. John Evelyn
  4. Samuel Pepys
  5. Jeremy Collier
  6. William Dampier
  7. John Wilmot
  8. Thomas Rymer

DRAMATIST

  1. George Etherage
  2. William Wycherley
  3. George Farquhar
  4. John Vanbrugh
  5. Colley Cibber
  6. Thomas Otway
  7. William Congreve
  8. Aphra Behn
  9. John Gay

VIII. Enlightenment Age ( 1700 to 1800 AD)

  1. Introduction to Enlightenment Age: Historic Background, Themes, Style

PROSE WRITERS

  1. Alexander Pope
  2. Jonathan Swift
  3. Richard Steele
  4. Joseph Addison
  5. Samuel Johnson

NOVELIST

  1. Daniel Defoe
  2. Henry Fieldings
  3. Samuel Richardson
  4. Tobias Smolett
  5. Laurence Sterne
  6. Charlotte Lennox

POETS

  1. Thomas Gray
  2. Oliver Goldsmith
  3. William Cowper
  4. Robert Burns
  5. William Blake
  6. James Thompson
  7. William Collins
  8. George Crabbe
  9. James Macpherson
  10. Thomas Chatterton
  11. Thomas Percy
  12. John Stagg

IX. Romantic Age (1800 to 1850)

  1. Introduction to Romantic Age Historic Background, Theme and Style

POETS

  1. William Wordsworth
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  3. Robert Southey
  4. Lord Byron
  5. P.B. Shelley
  6. John Keats
  7. John Clare

PROSE WRITERS

  1. William Hazlitt
  2. Leigh Hunt
  3. Charles Lamb
  4. Thomas De Quincy

NOVELIST

  1. Walter Scott
  2. Jane Austen
  3. Walter Savage Landor
  4. Mary Shelley
  5. Anne Radcliffe
  6. Horace Walpole
  7. Fanny Burney
  8. William Godwin
  9. Richard Sheridan

10 Victorian Age (1850 to 1900 AD)

  1. Introduction to Victorian Age Historic Background, Theme and Style

POETS

  1. Alfred Lord Tennyson
  2. Robert Browning
  3. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  5. Christina Rossetti
  6. William Morris
  7. A.C. Swinburne
  8. G.M. Hopkins
  9. Edward Fitzgerald

Novelist

  1. Charles Dickens
  2. William Makepeace Thackrey
  3. George Eliot
  4. Charles Reade
  5. Anthony Trollope
  6. Charlotte Bronte
  7. Emily Bronte
  8. Anne Bronte
  9. Bulwer Lyton
  10. Charles Kingsley
  11. Elizabeth Gaskell
  12. R.D. Blackmore
  13. George Meredith
  14. Thomas Hardy
  15. R.L. Stevenson
  16. Lewis Carroll
  17. William Wilkie Collins
  18. Arthur Conan Doyle

ESSAYIST

  1. Thomas Babington Macaulay
  2. Thomas Carlyle
  3. John Ruskin
  4. Matthew Arnold
  5. J.H. Newman
  6. Walter Pater
  7. Oscar Wilde

XI. Modern Age (1900 to 1950 AD)

  1. Introduction to Modern Age Historic Background, Theme, Style

NOVELIST

  1. Joseph Conrad
  2. George Orwell
  3. James Joyce
  4. Virginia Woolf
  5. D.H.Lawrence
  6. Aldous Huxley
  7. Graham Greene
  8. E.M. Foster
  9. Ford Madox Ford
  10. Arnold Bennett
  11. H.G. Wells
  12. J.M. Barrie
  13. Rudyard Kipling
  14. Samuel Butler

DRAMATIST

  1. John Galsworthy
  2. G.B.Shaw
  3. T. S. Eliot
  4. Sean O Casey
  5. J.M. Synge

POETS

  1. W.H. Auden
  2. W.B.Yeats
  3. Siegfried Sassoon
  4. Wilfred Owen
  5. Rupert Brooke
  6. Robert Graves
  7. Dylan Thomas
  8. John Masefield
  9. Alfred Noyes
  10. A.E. Housman

XII. Post Modern Age (1950 to 2000 AD)

  1. Introduction to Post Modern Age Historic Background, Theme, Style

NOVELIST

  1. Agatha Christie
  2. Jeanette Winterson
  3. J.R.R. Tolkien
  4. Bram Stoker
  5. Christopher Isherwood
  6. Bertrand Russell
  7. J.M. Priestley
  8. Somerset Maugham
  9. Doris Lessing
  10. J.K. Rowling
  11. William Golding
  12. Ian McEwan
  13. Lawrence Durrell
  14. Graham Swift
  15. Martin Amis
  16. Kingsley Amis
  17. Iris Murdoch
  18. John Fowles
  19. Muriel Spark
  20. A.S. Byatt
  21. Malcolm Bradbury
  22. Angela Carter
  23. Patrick Kavanagh
  24. J.P. Donleavey
  25. Anthony Powell
  26. David Storey
  27. Joyce Cary
  28. Angus Wilson
  29. Anthony Burgess
  30. Peter Ackroyd

DRAMATIST

  1. Alan Bennett
  2. Noel Coward
  3. Christopher Fry
  4. Harold Pinter
  5. Samuel Beckett
  6. Edward Bond
  7. Tom Stoppard
  8. Terence Rattigan
  9. Arnold Wesker
  10. John Osborne
  11. Caryl Churchill
  12. Joe Orton

POETS

  1. Seamus Heaney
  2. Ted Hughes
  3. Philip Larkin
  4. Roy Fuller
  5. Thom Gunn
  6. J.H. Prynne
  7. Geoffrey Hill

American Literature

XIII. Early American Literature

  1. Introduction to Early American Literature
  2. Founders of America

XIV. American Writers of Romantic Age

  1. Fredrick Douglass
  2. Harriet Beecher Stowe
  3. Hermann Melville
  4. James Cooper
  5. Louisa May Alcott
  6. Nathaniel Hawthorne
  7. Edgar Allan Poe
  8. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  9. Henry David Thoreau
  10. Washington Erving
  11. Emily Dickinson
  12. Walt Whitman
  13. William Cullen Bryant

XV. American Writers of Victorian Age

  1. Henry James
  2. Mark Twain
  3. Jack London
  4. Stephen Crane
  5. Charlotte Gilman Perkins
  6. Theodore Dreiser
  7. Kate Chopin
  8. Edith Wharton

XVI. American Writers of Modern Age

  1. William Faulkner
  2. Earnest Hemingway
  3. F. Scott Fitzgerald
  4. Gertrude Stein
  5. Sinclair Lewis
  6. Tennessee Williams
  7. Arthur Miller
  8. Eugene O Neil
  9. Susan Glaspell
  10. Robert Frost
  11. Wallace Stevens
  12. Ezra Pound
  13. H. D.
  14. William Carlos William
  15. E.E. Cummings

XVII. American Writers of Post Modern Age

  1. John Updike
  2. Harper Lee
  3. Truman Capote
  4. J.D. Salinger
  5. John O Hara
  6. John Steinbeck
  7. John Heller
  8. William S Burroughs
  9. Jack Kerouac
  10. Edward Albee
  11. Saul Bellow
  12. Ray Bradbury
  13. Allen Ginsberg
  14. Anne Sexton
  15. Sylvia Plath
  16. Robert Lowell
  17. Elizabeth Bishop

Postcolonial Literature

XVIII. African American Writers

  1. Tony Morrison
  2. Zora Neale Hurston
  3. Alice Walker
  4. Richard Wright
  5. Ralph Ellison
  6. James Baldwin
  7. Amiri Baraka
  8. Solomon Northrop
  9. Langston Hughes
  10. Maya Angelou

XIX. Writers of British Diaspora

  1. Jean Rhys
  2. Kazuo Ishiguru
  3. Hanif Kureshi
  4. Timothy Mo
  5. Caryl Phillips
  6. Salman Rushdie
  7. V.S. Naipaul
  8. Sam Selvon

XX. African Writers

  1. Chimananda Ngozi Adiche
  2. Chinua Achibe
  3. Nadine Gordimer
  4. J. M. Coetzee
  5. Wole Soyinka
  6. Ama Ata Aidoo
  7. Buchi Emecheta
  8. Bessie Head
  9. Ngugi Wa Thiong’ O
  10. Ben Okri
  11. Nuruddin Farah

XXI. Canadian Writers

  1. Michael Ondaatje
  2. Margaret Atwood
  3. Yann Martel
  4. Alice Munro
  5. Lawrence Hill
  6. Rohinton Mistry
  7. Margaret Lawrence
  8. Gabrielle Roy
  9. Shyam Selvadurai
  10. Maria Campbell
  11. Sinclair Ross
  12. Thomas King

XXII. Australian Writers

  1. A. D. Hope
  2. David Malouf
  3. Patrick White
  4. Peter Carey
  5. Judith Wright

XXIII. Caribbean & Colombian Writers

  1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  2. Derek Walcott
  3. Jamaica Kincaid
  4. Edward Braithwaite

European Literature

XXIV. Classical Greek Literature 

  1. Greek Gods & Other Mythical Characters
  2. History of Greek Civilization 
  3. Greek Theatre
  4. Homer 
  5. Aeschylus
  6. Sophocles
  7. Euripides
  8. Aristophanes
  9. Aesop
  10. Pindar

XXV. Classical Roman Literature 

  1. History of Rome
  2. Old Testament (History of Christianity)
  3. New Testament (History of Christianity)
  4. Cicero
  5. Virgil
  6. Ovid
  7. Seneca 

XXVI. Italian Literature 

  1. Dante Alighieri
  2. Petrarch
  3. Giovanni Boccaccio
  4. Thomas Aquinas
  5. Niccolo Machiavelli
  6. Luigi Pirandello
  7. Italo Calvino
  8. Umberto Eco 

XXVII. Russian Literature 

  1. Fyodor Dostoevsky
  2. Leo Tolstoy
  3. Alexander Pushkin
  4. Anton Chekhov
  5. Boris Pasternak
  6. Ivan Turgenev
  7. Mikhail Bulgakov
  8. Vladimir Nabakov
  9. Ivan Bunin
  10. Maxim Gorky 

XXVIII. German Literature 

  1. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
  2. Bertolt Brecht
  3. Thomas Mann
  4. Franz Kafka
  5. Herman Hesse
  6. Gunter Grass 

XXIX. French Literature 

  1. Montaigne
  2. Moliere
  3. Voltaire
  4. Eugene Ionesco
  5. Gustave Flaubert
  6. Honare De Balzac
  7. Emile Zola
  8. Albert Camus
  9. Marcel Proust
  10. Charles Baudelaire
  11. Guy De Maupassant
  12. Jean Paul Satre
  13. Milan Kundera
  14. Jean Genet
  15. Alexander Dumas 

XXX. Other European Literature 

  1. Jean Jacques Rousseau
  2. Miguel De Cervantes
  3. August Strindberg
  4. Henrik Ibsen 

Indian English Literature

XXXI. Early Indian English Writing 

  1. Early Indian English Writing
  2. Raja Ram Mohan Roy
  3. Mahatma Gandhi

XXXII. Indian English Novelist 

  1. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
  2. Mulk Raj Anand
  3. R.K Narayan
  4. Raja Rao
  5. Kamala Markandaya
  6. Manohar Malgaonkar
  7. Khushwant Singh
  8. Bharti Mukharjee
  9. Nirad C. Chaudhari
  10. Ruskin Bond
  11. Shashi Deshpande
  12. G.V Desani
  13. U. R. Ananthamurthy
  14. Anita Desai
  15. Kiran Desai
  16. Arun Joshi
  17. Arundhati Roy
  18. Nayantara Sahga
  19. lJhumpa Lahiri
  20. Amitav Ghosh 

 XXXIII. Indian English Poets 

  1. Michael Madhusudan Dutt
  2. Toru Dutt
  3. Sri Aurobindo
  4. Sarojini Naidu
  5. Rabindranath Tagore
  6. Kamala Das
  7. A.K Ramanujan
  8. A.K Melhotra
  9. Nissim Ezekiel
  10. Gopi Kattoor
  11. Agha Shahid Ali
  12. Arun Kolatkar
  13. Gieve Patel
  14. Keki Daruwalla
  15. Meena Alexander
  16. Jayant Mahapatra
  17. Mahashweta Devi
  18. Vikram Seth
  19. P.Lal
  20. R. Parthasarathy 

XXXIV. Indian Aesthetics 

  1. Introduction to Indian Aesthetics
  2. Rasa School (Bharat Muni)
  3. Alamkara School (Bhamaha)
  4. Guna Dosa School (Dandin)
  5. Riti School (Vamana)
  6. Dhwani School (Anandvardhana)
  7. Vakroti School (Kuntaka)
  8. Aucitya School (Ksemendra) 

XXXV. Indian Dramatist  

  1. Mahesh Dattani
  2. Girish Karnad
  3. Badal Sarkar
  4. Vijay Tendulkar 

Literary Criticism

XXXVI. Greek Critics  

  1. Socrates
  2. Plato
  3. Aristotle

 XXXVII. Roman Critics

  1. Horace
  2. Longinus
  3. Quintilian

XXXVIII. Middle Age Critics  

  1. Philip Sidney

XXXIX. Enlightenment Age Critics

  1. John Dryden
  2. Alexander Pope
  3. Samuel Johnson 

Thinkers  

  1. Thomas Hobbes
  2. John Locke
  3. Giambattista Vico
  4. Edmund Burke
  5. Edward Gibbon
  6. Adam Smith

XL. Romantic Age Critics  

  1. William Wordsworth
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  3. John Keats 

XLI. Victorian Age Critics  

  1. George Eliot
  2. Friedrich Nietsche
  3. G.M Hopkins
  4. Henry James
  5. Matthew Arnold
  6. T.S Eliot 

Literary Theory 

 XLII. New Criticism  

  1. Understanding Literary Theory
  2. What is New Criticism?
  3. William Empson
  4. I.A Richards
  5. Cleanth Brooks
  6. F.R Leavis
  7. Wimsatt & Beardsley
  8. R.P Blackmur
  9. Allen Tate
  10. John Crowe Ransom
  11. Neo Aristotelian

XLIII. Formalism 

  1. What is Formalism?
  2. Victor Shklovsky
  3. Boris Echenbaum
  4. Yuri Tynyanov
  5. Roman Jacobson 

XLIV. Structuralism

  1. What is Structuralism?
  2. Ferdinand De Saussure
  3. C.S Peire
  4. Claude Levi Strass
  5. Vladimir Propp
  6. A.J Greimas
  7. Gerard Genette
  8. Mikhail Bhakin
  9. Roland Barthes 

XLV. Post Structuralism & Deconstructionism

  1. What is Post Structuralism & Deconstructionism?
  2. Michael Foucault
  3. Jacques Derrida
  4. Paul De Mann
  5. J.H Miller  

XLVI. Post Modernism

  1. What is Post Modernism?
  2. Jean Baudrillard
  3. Julia Kristeva
  4. Jean Francois Lyotard
  5. Frederic Jameson  

XLVII. Psychoanalysis Criticism

  1. What is Psychoanalysis Criticism?
  2. Sigmund Freud
  3. Jacques Lacan
  4. Harold Bloom
  5. Noam Chomsky

XLVIII. Archetypal Criticism

  1. What is Archetypal Criticism?
  2. J.S Frazer
  3. Carl Jung
  4. Northrop Frye
  5. Maud Bodkin 

XLIX. Reader Response Theory  

  1. What is Reader Response Theory?
  2. Norman Holland
  3. Wolfgang Iser
  4. Stanley Fish
  5. H.R Hauss  

L. Feminism

  1. What is Feminism?
  2. Mary Wollstonecraft
  3. Margaret Fuller
  4. J.S Mill
  5. Virginia Woolf
  6. Simon De Beauvoir
  7. Kate Millett
  8. Judith Butler
  9. Elaine Showalter
  10. Helene Cixous
  11. Sandra & Susan Gilbert
  12. Shulamith Firestone 

LI. Marxism  

  1. What is Marxist Criticism?
  2. Karl Marx & Engels
  3. Louis Althrusser
  4. Antonio Gramsci
  5. Pierre Bourdieu
  6. Paul Ricoeur
  7. Ernest Mandel   

LII. New Historicism & Cultural Studies

  1. What is New Historicism & Cultural Studies?
  2. Stephen Greenbalt
  3. Raymond William
  4. Stuart Hall

LIII. Queer Theory  

  1. What is Queer Theory?
  2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
  3. Alan Sinfield
  4. Adrienne Rich 

LIV. Eco Criticism

  1. What is Eco Criticism?
  2. Deep Ecology
  3. Marxist Environmentalism
  4. Apocalypticism
  5. Third World Environmentalism
  6. Ecofeminism

LV. Postcolonial Criticism  

  1. What is Postcolonial Criticism?
  2. Franz Fanon
  3. Edward Said
  4. Homi K Bhabha
  5. Gayatri Spivak
  6. Aime Cesaire & Leopold
  7. Edward Soja
  8. Benedict Anderson
  9. Antonio Negri & Michael Hart
  10. Salman Rushdie
  11. Bill Ashcroft 

Literary Terms & Devices

LVI. Literary Devices & Figures of Speech

  1. Allegory
  2. Alliteration
  3. Allusion
  4. Anaphora
  5. Antithesis
  6. Apostrophe
  7. Bathos
  8. Conceit
  9. Circumlocution
  10. Chaismus
  11. Diacope
  12. Hyperbole
  13. Imagery
  14. Irony
  15. Juxtaposition
  16. Kenning
  17. Litotes
  18. Metaphor
  19. Metonymy
  20. Onomatopoeia
  21. Oxymoron
  22. Pathetic Fallacy
  23. Paradox
  24. Personification
  25. Prolepsis
  26. Simile
  27. Synecdoche
  28. Synesthesia
  29. Transferred Epithet
  30. Zeugma

LVII. Literary Terms 

  1. Anti Climax
  2. Anti Hero
  3. Byronic Hero
  4. Bowdlerize
  5. Carpe Diem
  6. Celtic Myths
  7. Dream Vision
  8. Deus Ex Machina
  9. Epiphany
  10. Epilogue
  11. Euphemism
  12. Epigraph
  13. Epithet
  14. Epitaph
  15. Incunabula
  16. Motif
  17. Malapropism
  18. Purple Patch
  19. Poetic Licence
  20. Poetic Justice
  21. Poetic Diction
  22. Palinode
  23. Parody
  24. Satire
  25. Soliloquy

LVIII- Types of Fiction

  1. Apocalyptic Literature
  2. Bildungsroman
  3. Campus Novel
  4. Chivalric Romance
  5. Dystopian
  6. Epistolary Novel
  7. Gothic
  8. Historic
  9. Metafiction
  10. Mystery
  11. Magic Realism
  12. Memoir
  13. Picaresque
  14. Science Fiction
  15. Roman e Clef

LIX- Types of Narrators

  1. Narrative Perspective: First, Second & Third Person Point of View
  2. Omniscient Narrator
  3. Limited Narrator
  4. Unreliable Narrator
  5. Objective Narrator

LX- Types of Characters

  1. Protagonist & Antagonist
  2. Major & Minor Characters
  3. Dynamic & Static Characters
  4. Flat & Round Characters
  5. Stock Characters

LXI- Prosody

  1. Introduction to Rhetoric & Prosody
  2. Introduction to Meter
  3. Types of Metrical Patterns
  4. Rhyme & Types of Rhyme
  5. Types of Stanza
  6. Types of Rhyme Scheme
  7. Types of Verse
  8. Enjambment
  9. Caesura
  10. Refrain

LXII- Types of Poetry 

  1. Dramatic Poetry
  2. Narrative Poetry
  3. Epic Poetry
  4. Lyric Poetry
  5. Elegy
  6. Sonnet
  7. Ode
  8. Pastoral Poetry
  9. Concrete Poetry
  10. Doggerel

 

If you are looking forward to prepare for

UGC NET/JRF, you may find this article useful.

©2024. Md. Rustam Ansari [profrustamansari@gmail.com]

Loading

Tags:

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You can change the language to 'Hindi' by clicking on the 'British Flag' icon at the bottom-right corner of the page.

Close
error: Content is protected !!