30 Days Preparation Plan for PPSC Exams of English Lecturer, Instructor, and Assistant Professor

Suggested By: 

Shuaib Asghar, 

Assistant Professor of English 

Govt. Rizvia Islamia Graduate College 

Haroonabad

Day 1:

• Introduction to Different Kinds of Subjective Poetry i.e. Lyric, Elegy, Ode, Sonnet
• Introduction to Different Kinds of Objective Poetry i.e. Ballad, Epic, Mock-Epic, Idyll, Dramatic Monologue
• Adonais by P. B. Shelley
• Ode to Autumn, Ode on Melancholy,
• Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
• The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Day 2:

• Commonly Used Figures of Speech in Poetry with Examples and Different Stanza Forms
• Meter and Rhythm: Iambic, Trochaic, Anapestic, Dactylic, Amphibrachic
• Rhymed Verse and Blank Verse
• Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
• Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake
• Andrea Del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi by Robert Browning

Day 3:

• Introduction to Different kinds of Drama i.e. Miracle Play, Mystery Play, Morality Play, Historical Play, Revenge Tragedy, Heroic Tragedy, Melodrama, Monodrama
• Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Day 4:

• Introduction to Comedy, Classical Comedy, Romantic Comedy, Shakespearean Comedy, Comedy of Humours, Comedy of Manners, Farce, Masque, Tragicomedy, Comedia dell’arte
• The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, As You Like it by William Shakespeare
• Everyman in his Humour, The Alchemist by Ben Jonson

Day 5:

• Introduction to Novel, Picaresque Novel, Panoramic Novel, Historical Novel, Regional Novel, Psychological Novel, Stream of Consciousness Novel
• Pamela by Richardson
• Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding

Day 6:

• Anglo-Saxon / Old English Period (410-1066): Major Writers, Brief Survey of their Works
• Anglo-Norman / Middle English Period (1066-1300): Major Writers, Brief Survey of their Works
• Age of Chaucer (1340-1400)
• The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Day 7:

• University Wits i.e. Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Nash, John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, George Peele
• Renaissance Movement (16th Century) / Elizabethan Age (1558-1603): Trends, Major Contributors and a Brief Survey of their Works
• Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe
• Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well that Ends Well by William Shakespeare
• Brief Survey of the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard-Earl of Surrey
• Shepherd’s Calendar by Edmund Spenser

Day 8:

• Puritan Age (1601-1660): Trends, Major Writers and a Brief Survey of their Works
• Cavalier Poets i.e. Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Robert Herrick, John Suckling
• Brief Survey of Jacobean (1603-1625) and Caroline Age (1625-1649)
• The Sun Rising, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, The Anniversary, The Good Morrow, Twickenham Garden by John Donne
• Paradise Lost by John Milton

Day 9:

• Restoration Period / Age of Dryden (1660-1700): Trends, Major Writers and a Brief Survey of their Works
• Carolean Age (1660-1685): Trends, Major Writers and a Brief Survey of their Works
• The Way of the World by William Congreve
• Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden
• The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

Day 10:

• Poetry and Prose of the Augustan Age / Age of Pope (1701-1745): Trends, Major Writers and a Brief Survey of their Works
• The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
• Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
• Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Day 11:

• Poets of the Age of Sensibility / Age of Johnson (1745-1798) i.e. Robert Burns, William Blake
• Graveyard Poets i.e. Thomas Gray, William Collins, William Cowper, Oliver Goldsmith
• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
• To a Mouse, Man was Made to Mourn by Robert Burns
• Odes to Simplicity, To Fear, To the Passions, Ode to Evening by William Collins
• The Divine Image, Holy Thursday, The Little Black Boy, The Chimney Sweepers, A Poison Tree by William Blake

Day 12:

• Prose of the Age of Sensibility / Age of Johnson (1745-1798)
• Brief Survey of the Prose of Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon
• Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson
• Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
• All for Love by John Dryden

Day 13:

• Eighteenth Century (1701-1800) Novel: Trends, Major Writers, and a Brief Survey of their Works
• Eighteenth Century (1701-1800) Drama: Trends, Major Writers, and a Brief Survey of their Works
• Jonathan Wild by Henry Fielding
• The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
• The Rivals, The School for Scandal by R. B. Sheridan

Day 14:

• Novelists and Prose Writers of the Romantic Age (1798-1832)
• The Gothic Novel: A Brief Survey of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James
• Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma by Jane Austen
• Brief Survey of the Prose of William Hazlitt and Thomas de Quincey
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Wuthering Heights by Emile Bronte

Day 15:

• Poets of the Romantic Age (1798-1832): The Lake Poets, The Scott Group, The Younger Group, First and Second Romantic Generation
• Tintern Abbey, Ode on the Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan by S. T. Coleridge
• The Lady of the Last Minstrel, The Lord of the Isles by Sir Walter Scott
• Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, Ode to the West Wind, Prometheus Unbound by P. B. Shelley
• English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Vision of Judgment by Lord Byron

Day 16:

• Early Victorian Period (1832-1870): Trends, Major Writers and a Brief Survey of their Works
• In Memoriam by Alfred Tennyson
• Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
• On Liberty by J. S. Mill
• Hero and Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyle
• Work, War by John Ruskin

Day 17:

• Later Victorian Period (1870-1901): Trends, Major Writers and a Brief Survey of their Works
• Pre-Raphaelite Poets i.e. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris
• Middle March, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Day 18:

• Twentieth Century English Poetry: Trends, Major Poets and a Brief Survey of their Works
• The Waste Land, The Love Song, The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot
• The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Easter 1916 by W. B. Yeats
• Death of a Naturalist, A Constable Call, Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
• The Thought Fox, That Morning, Jaguar by Ted Hughes
• Mr. Bleaney, Church Going, Ambulances by Philip Larkin

Day 19:

• Twentieth Century English Drama: Trends, Major Dramatists and a Brief Survey of their Works
• Poetic Drama, Historical and Imaginative Plays in Twentieth Century
• Devil’s Disciple, Pygmalion, Major Barbara by Bernard Shaw
• Justice by John Galsworthy
• Seven Short Plays by Lady Gregory
• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
• The Wild Duck, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

Day 20:

• Twentieth Century English Novel: Trends, Major Novelists and a Brief Survey of their Works
• Bloomsbury Group i.e. Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey etc.
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
• Captain Courageous, Kim by Rudyard Kipling
• 1984, Animal Farm by George Orwell

Day 21:

• The Transitionalists i.e. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
• The Angry Young Men i.e. John Osborne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis
• Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
• Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
• Look Back in Anger by John Osborne

Day 22:

• Major Literary Theories & Movements i.e. Feminism, Symbolism, Modernism, Postmodernism, High modernism, Aestheticism, Naturalism, Marxism, Magic Realism, Poststructuralism, Expressionism, Impressionism, Postcolonialism, Transcendentalism, Deconstruction, Enlightenment, Metaphysical Poetry, Theatre of the Absurd, Beat Generation, Lost Generation etc.
• Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’ Casey
• The Caretaker by Harold Pinter
• The Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco

Day 23:

• Brief Survey of the Famous Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, V. S. Pritchett, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ray Bradbury, Mark Twain, Tim O’Brien, Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, and O. Henry
• Poetics by Aristotle
• On the Sublime by Longinus
• Preface to Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson
• Biographia Literaria by S. T. Coleridge
• Preface to Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth
• An Apology for Poetry by Philip Sydney

Day 24:

• Major Literary Terms i.e. Anaphora, Aphorism, Climax, Colloquialism, Euphemism, Imagery, Analogy, Hyperbole, Onomatopoeia, Irony, Malapropism, Anachronism, Chiasmus, Foreshadowing, Juxtaposition, Metonymy, Ekphrasis, Neologism etc.
• Introduction to Essay, Its Chief Characteristics and Major Essayists in English Literature
• Critical Theories of Mathew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Cleanth Brooks
• Of Truth, Of Study, Of Revenge, Of Great Place, Of Simulation and Dissimulation by Francis Bacon
• New Year’s Eve, Dream Children, Poor Relations by Charles Lamb
• Ideas that have Helped Mankind, Ideas that have Harmed Mankind by Bertrand Russell

Day 25:

• Introduction and Brief History of American Novel, Famous Novels and Themes
• Brief Survey of the Major Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Mark Twain
• A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and The Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• Jazz by Toni Morrison

Day 26:

• Introduction and Brief History of American Drama and Poetry
• Brief Survey of the Major Works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. H. Auden, and W. H. Davies
• Long Days’ Journey into Night, Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill
• Death of a Salesman, The Crucible by Arthur Miller
• Mending Wall, After Apple Picking, The Road Not Taken, Tree at My Window, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Acquainted with the Night, The Pasture, Meeting and Passing by Robert Frost

Day 27:

• Phonetics: Various Branches of Phonetics, Classification of Consonants and Vowels
• Segmental Phonology: Phoneme, Allophone, Phone, Assimilation, Dissimilation, Elision etc.
• Supra Segmental Phonology: Intonation, Stress, Syllable etc.
• Morphology: Morpheme, Classification of Morpheme, Allomorph, Morph
• Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot
• She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
• Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Day 28:

• Socio-linguistics: Dialect, Sociolect, Idiolect, Register, Lingua-Franca, Diglossia, Pidgin, Creole, Bilingualism etc.
• Psycho-linguistics: Behaviorism, Mentalism
• Pragmatics 
• Semantics
• Linguistic Terms
• East of Eden, The Pearl by John Steinbeck
• The Scholar Gipsy by Mathew Arnold
• The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

Day 29:

• Parts of Speech, Noun, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Adjective, Conjunction etc. Definitions and Different Kinds
• Direct and Indirect Speech / Narration
• Active and Passive Sentences
• Commonly Used Phrasal Verbs, Prepositions and Idioms
• Brief Survey of Major Pakistani English Writers i.e. Bapsi Sidhwa, Kamila Shamsie, Zulfikar Ghose, Ahmed Ali, Mohsin Hamid, Muhammad Hanif, Taufiq Rafat, Sara Suleri, Hanif Qureshi
• Brief Survey of the Major Indian English Writers i.e. Rabindranath Tagore, Vikram Seth, R. K. Narayan, Chetan Bhagat, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Anita Desai, Aurobindo Ghosh, Aravind Adiga, Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh, Sarojini Naidu

Day 30:

• Synonyms, Antonyms

(Try to enhance your vocabulary as much as possible from different books, exercises or with the help of internet and apps available on Google playstore)

• Famous Works of English Literature with their Age of Publication
• Famous Literary Characters
• Nobel Prize Winners in Literature
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russain)
• War and Peace, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Russain)
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Brazilian)
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Nigerian)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Columbian)

*Candidates can improve their general knowledge and ability by developing a habit of getting in touch with the latest political and social developments in the world. In addition you can purchase any book of MCQs on General Ability and reading it for only half an hour daily is enough to increase the basic knowledge of Science, Geography, Mathematics, Islamic Studies and Computer Science.

Recommended Books:

1. A Background to English Literature by Dr. Raghukul Tilak
2. A History of English Literature by B. R. Mullick
3. History of English Literature by Dr. T. Singh
4. Quintessence of Literary Essays and Viva Voce by W. R. Goodman
5. A Critical History of English Literature by David Daiches
6. ارسطو سے ایلیٹ تک از ڈاکٹر جمیل جالبی
7. تاریخ ادب انگریزی از ڈاکٹر محمد احسن فاروقی
8.  Any collection of literary terms and figures of speech available in the market
9. Objective Helping Books for PPSC Exams by Dogars, Ilmi, and Karwan Publishers