Syllabus for English Literature Optional

UPSC offers English as an optional subject in the UPSC Civil Services Mains Exam. The English Literature optional syllabus for UPSC Mains is dynamic and covers literature from old English used during the medieval and early modern period as well as modern English used from 1900 AD onwards. The English language is also one of the compulsory language papers in UPSC Mains. Candidates with a strong English background and who have an interest in reading novels and poetry collections should take up English Literature as optional.

The Renaissance: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama; Metaphysical Poetry; The Epic and the Mock-epic; Neo-classicism; 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.

Modernism; Poets of the Thirties; The stream-of-consciousness Novel; Absurd Drama; Colonialism and Post-Colonialism; Indian Writing in English; Marxist, Psychoanalytical and Feminist approaches to literature; Post-Modernism.

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
• 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
  • Small-Scale 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. Naipaul. A House for Mr. Biswas.