UPPSC English Literature Assistant Professor Syllabus, Eligibility – GDC Examination 2025

September 14, 2025

Are you preparing for the UPPSC English Literature Assistant Professor Exam 2025? This comprehensive guide will walk you through the detailed syllabus, subject-wise topics, and preparation focus areas for the upcoming Government Degree College (GDC) Examination.

Aspirants should thoroughly understand the literary history, major authors, genres, criticism, linguistics, and Indian/World literature in English to excel in this competitive exam. Here’s a unit-wise breakdown:

UPPSC English Literature Assistant Professor Syllabus 2025

Unit I: Forms of Literature & Literary Background (16th – 20th Century)

  • Major forms of literature – poetry, prose, drama, fiction, essays.

  • Literary movements, trends, and historical background from the Renaissance to the Modern Age.

  • Understanding evolution of genres and literary criticism over four centuries.

Unit II: Poetry & Drama

Poetry (16th – 20th Century)

  • Geoffrey Chaucer – Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Modern version)

  • John Donne – The Canonization, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, The Ecstasy

  • Andrew Marvell – To His Coy Mistress

  • Edmund Spenser – Epithalamion

  • William Blake – The Tyger, The Lamb

  • Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold – Selected works (as per syllabus)

  • Modern poets – Yeats, Auden, Larkin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney

Drama

  • Christopher Marlowe – Dr. Faustus

  • William Shakespeare – Hamlet, Twelfth Night

  • John Webster – Duchess of Malfi

  • Ben Jonson – Volpone

  • Aphra Behn – The Rover

  • G.B. Shaw – Candida

  • Harold Pinter – The Homecoming

  • Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot

  • John Osborne – Look Back in Anger

Unit III: Fiction & Prose

  • Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews

  • Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

  • George Eliot – Silas Marner

  • Dickens – Hard Times

  • Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Urbervilles

  • Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness

  • James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  • Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse

  • D.H. Lawrence – The Rainbow

  • William Golding – Lord of the Flies

  • Graham Greene – The Power and the Glory

  • Major prose writers – Bacon, Addison, Mill, Carlyle, Russell

Unit IV: Linguistics & Language Teaching

  • Descriptive and generative linguistics

  • Sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, stylistics

  • Language variation, standardization, competence & performance

  • Grammar Translation Method, Direct Method, Audio-Lingual, Communicative Language Teaching

  • Teaching of language skills (LSRW) & error analysis

  • Language testing & technological aids

Unit V: Indian Writing in English

  • Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu

  • Raja Rao – On the Ganga Ghat

  • Girish Karnad – Nagamandala

  • Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children

  • Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things

  • Anita Desai – Fire on the Mountain

  • A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Jayanta Mahapatra

Unit VI: American Literature

  • Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe

  • Arthur Miller – Death of a Salesman

  • Herman Melville – Moby Dick

  • Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie

  • Langston Hughes – Selected poems

  • Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms

  • T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land

Unit VII: New Literatures in English

  • A.D. Hope, Margaret Atwood – The Blind Assassin

  • Derek Walcott – A Far Cry from Africa

  • Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart

  • V.S. Naipaul – A House for Mr. Biswas

  • Wole Soyinka – A Dance of the Forest

  • Ngugi wa Thiong’o – Decolonising the Mind

Unit VIII: Women Writing & Feminism

  • Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre

  • Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea

  • Toni Morrison – Beloved

  • Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – We Should All Be Feminists

  • Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pratibha Ray

Unit IX: Literature in Translation

  • Translation theories – Foreignization, Domestication, Skopos Theory

  • Works in translation – Saadat Hasan Manto (Toba Tek Singh), Munshi Premchand (Gift of a Cow), Vijay Tendulkar (Silence! The Court is in Session), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Dostoyevsky (Notes from Underground), Baudelaire (Flowers of Evil)

Unit X: Literary Criticism & Theory

  • Bharat Muni – Natyashastra

  • Philip Sidney – Apology for Poetry

  • Samuel Johnson – Preface to Shakespeare

  • Wordsworth – Preface to Lyrical Ballads

  • Coleridge – Biographia Literaria (Ch. XIII)

  • T.S. Eliot – Tradition and the Individual Talent

  • Derrida, Saussure, Althusser, Showalter, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Spivak, Ecocriticism

General Studies Syllabus (Common for All Subjects)

In addition to English Literature, candidates must prepare for General Studies, which includes:

  1. General Science

  2. Current Events (National & International Importance)

  3. History of India & National Movement

  4. Indian Polity & Economy

  5. Geography – Indian & World

  6. Mental Ability & Statistical Data Analysis (with focus on Uttar Pradesh)

UPPSC English Literature Assistant Professor Eligibility 2025

Option A: Master’s Degree + NET/SET/SLET

A Master’s degree with 55% marks (or equivalent grade) in English Literature or a relevant/allied subject from an Indian University,
OR an equivalent degree from an accredited foreign university.

Additionally, candidates must have cleared the National Eligibility Test (NET) conducted by UGC/CSIR or an equivalent accredited test like SLET/SET.

Candidates with a Ph.D. Degree as per UGC Regulations (2009/2016 & amendments) are exempt from NET/SLET/SET, provided they fulfill the following conditions (for Ph.D. registered before July 11, 2009):

  • Ph.D. awarded in regular mode.

  • Thesis evaluated by at least two external examiners.

  • Open Ph.D. viva voce conducted.

  • At least two research papers published from Ph.D. work (one in a refereed journal).

  • At least two papers presented in UGC/ICSSR/CSIR-sponsored seminars/conferences.

Certification must be provided by the Registrar/Dean (Academic Affairs) of the awarding University.

Note: NET/SLET/SET exemption applies to subjects where these tests are not conducted.

Option B: Ph.D. from Top 500 Foreign Universities

A Ph.D. degree from a foreign university/institution ranked among the top 500 in global rankings by:

    • QS (Quacquarelli Symonds)

    • Times Higher Education (THE)

    • Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) by Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Conclusion

The UPPSC English Literature Assistant Professor Exam 2025 is an excellent opportunity for aspirants aiming for a teaching career in Government Degree Colleges. The syllabus covers literary history, major works from Chaucer to postmodern writers, linguistics, criticism, and Indian as well as world literature, making it vast yet rewarding.

A focused preparation strategy, combining literary analysis, historical context, and regular revision of key texts, along with General Studies practice, will help you maximize your score.

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