Question:medium
"The emancipation of women", James Joyce told one of his friends, "has caused the greatest revolution in our time."
Other modernists agree: Virginia Woolf, claiming that in about 1910 "human character changed" and illustrating the new balance between the sexes, urged, "Read the 'Agamemnon' and see whether your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra". D.H. Lawrence wrote "perhaps the deepest fight for 200 years and more has been the fight for women's independence".
But if modernist writers considered women's revolt against men's domination as one of their "greatest" and "deepest" themes, only recently, perhaps in the past 15 years has literary criticism begun to catch up with it. Not that the images of sexual antagonism that abound in modern literature have gone unremarked - far from it. We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature, the landscapes of literary history and the features of individual books have begun to change.
According to the passage, modernists are changing literary criticism by:
"The emancipation of women", James Joyce told one of his friends, "has caused the greatest revolution in our time."
Other modernists agree: Virginia Woolf, claiming that in about 1910 "human character changed" and illustrating the new balance between the sexes, urged, "Read the 'Agamemnon' and see whether your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra". D.H. Lawrence wrote "perhaps the deepest fight for 200 years and more has been the fight for women's independence".
But if modernist writers considered women's revolt against men's domination as one of their "greatest" and "deepest" themes, only recently, perhaps in the past 15 years has literary criticism begun to catch up with it. Not that the images of sexual antagonism that abound in modern literature have gone unremarked - far from it. We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature, the landscapes of literary history and the features of individual books have begun to change.
According to the passage, modernists are changing literary criticism by:
Show Hint
Look at the passage's closing lines about perspective.
Updated On: Jul 15, 2026
- Noting instances of hostility between men and women
- Seeing literature from fresh points of view
- Studying the works of early twentieth-century writers
- Reviewing books written by feminists
Show Solution
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
Look at the closing lines of the passage carefully. The author says the landscapes of literary history are changing not because new evidence has appeared, but because there are now enough women reading and interpreting literature to shift how old books get read. That is a change in viewpoint, not a change in subject matter.
Rule out the wrong choices one by one. Choice 1 talks about spotting hostility between the sexes, but the passage already tells us such antagonism in literature has been present in modern literature for a while, so noticing hostility is not the new development described here. Choice 3 turns the modernist writers into a syllabus, as though criticism now means studying Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence, but the passage uses those three only as proof that the theme is old, not as the new critical method. Choice 4 narrows the change to feminist authors specifically, which is far more restrictive than what the passage describes, since it talks about all of literary history and individual books in general.
What remains is the idea that critics and readers are simply seeing old texts through a new lens, which is exactly option 2, so that is the answer.
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Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
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