English Optional Syllabus for Civil Service Examination

The UPSC Civil Services Exam is conducted in three stages. Prelims, Mains, and Interview. Candidates have to select one optional subject for UPSC IAS Mains that would act as a game-changer in order to get an overall better ranking. English Literature optional paper have been performing good in recent years.   UPSC offers English Literature optional subjects. The syllabus of English Literature in UPSC Mains covers a wide range of time—right from Old English of medieval and early modern periods to modern English from 1900 AD onwards. Besides, the scope of this paper also includes English in one of the compulsory language papers in UPSC Mains.   This optional subject will be very appealing to those candidates who have a strong foundation in English and a passion for reading novels and poetry collections. The English literature optional will consist of two papers: Paper-I and Paper-II, each carrying 250 marks in UPSC Mains, which adds up to a total of 500 marks.  

English Syllabus for UPSC Optional – Paper I

  The English Optional subject for UPSC examination includes the following topics:  

• 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  

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

• Canonization;
• Death be not proud;
• The Good Morrow;
• On his Mistress going to bed;
• The Relic;

3. John Milton: Paradise Lost, I, II, IV, IX.
4. Alexander Pope. The Rape of the Lock.
5. 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.

6. Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam.
7. Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House.

  Section B  

1. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels.
2. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice.
3. Henry Fielding: Tom Jones.
4. Charles Dickens; Hard Times.
5. George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss.
6. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

7.Mark Twain; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

English Syllabus for UPSC Optional – Paper II

  The topics covered in the paper 2 of English Optional for UPSC CS Examination as follows:

• 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  

1. 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.

2. T.S. Eliot. The following poems : 

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. 
• Journey of the Magi.
• Burnt Norton.

3. 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

4. John Osborne: Look Back in Anger. 
5. Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. 
6. Philip Larkin. The following poems: 

• Next

• Please
• Deceptions
• Afternoons
• Days
• Mr. Bleaney

    7. A.K. Ramanujan. The following poems:

• Looking for a Cousin 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      1.Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim.    2.James Joyce; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.    3.D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers.    4.E.M. Forster: A Passage to India.    5.Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway.    6.Raja Rao: Kanthapura.    7.V.S. Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas.   The aspirants for the IAS need to realise that the English optional for UPSC, too, is very competitive and hence requires great preparation to achieve a good score. It is also important that candidates be well-practiced by solving previous years’ UPSC question papers and taking mock tests in order to crack the UPSC English Literature paper.