Kerala SET English Syllabus 2026 PDF Download: Unit-wise Syllabus, Exam Pattern & Preparation Guide

Particular

Details

Exam Name

Kerala State Eligibility Test (Kerala SET)

Subject

English

Conducting Authority

LBS Centre for Science and Technology

Kerala SET Exam Paper

Paper 2 (English)

Kerala SET Exam Level

State Eligibility Test

Kerala SET 2026 Exam Mode

Offline (OMR Based)

Kerala SET English Syllabus 2026 Total Units

6

Kerala SET English Syllabus 2026 Total Modules

120 (Approx.)

Official Kerala SET English Syllabus 2026 

Prescribed by LBS Centre

Kerala SET Official Website

https://lbsedp.lbscentre.in/setjul26/

Kerala SET English Syllabus 2026 Units

Kerala SET English Syllabus 2026 Topics Covered

Unit 1

History of English Literature (Chaucer to the Neo-Classical Age)

Unit 2

Romantic and Victorian Literature

Unit 3

Twentieth Century & Contemporary British Literature

Unit 4

American Literature, Indian Writing in English & New Literatures

Unit 5

History of English Language, Linguistics & English Language Teaching (ELT)

Unit 6

Literary Theory, Literary Criticism & Cultural Studies

Module

Topics Covered

Module 1

Chaucer's Age – Socio-political background, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

Module 2

Early Renaissance in England – William Caxton, Thomas Malory, Songs and Ballads, Thomas More's Utopia

Module 3

Late Renaissance England – Wyatt and Surrey, Beginning of the English Sonnet, Edmund Spenser, Prothalamion, Spenserian Sonnet

Module 4

Beginning of English Prose – Sir Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Browne, University Wits

Module 5

Rise of English Drama – Mystery Plays, Miracle Plays, Morality Plays, Interludes, Gorboduc, Ralph Roister Doister

Module 6

Revenge Tragedy – Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Blank Verse, John Webster, Ben Jonson, Comedy of Humours

Module 7

Elizabethan Theatre – Stage, Audience, Patronage, London Theatres, Stage Conventions, Soliloquy, Aside, Masque

Module 8

William Shakespeare – Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, Problem Plays, Sources of Shakespeare's Plays

Module 9

Shakespeare – Language, Folio, Quarto, Shakespearean Sonnets

Module 10

Metaphysical Poetry – John Donne (The Canonization), George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, Metaphysical Conceit

Module 11

Puritan England – Reformation, Oliver Cromwell, Commonwealth, John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

Module 12

John Milton – Paradise Lost (Book I), Lycidas, Sonnets, Prose, Pamphlets

Module 13

The Restoration – Restoration Drama, Comedy of Manners, William Congreve, William Wycherley

Module 14

Neo-Classical Age – Literary Features and Socio-political Background

Module 15

Heroic Drama, Anti-Sentimental Comedy, Richard Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith

Module 16

Popular Prose Writing – Samuel Pepys, Periodical Essays, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Tatler, Spectator, Coffee Houses and Clubs

Module 17

John Dryden and Alexander Pope – Mock Heroic, Mock Epic, Mac Flecknoe

Module 18

Dr. Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, John Locke

Module 19

Rise of the Novel – Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Epistolary Novel, Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding, Picaresque Novel, Laurence Sterne

Module 20

Transition Poetry – Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, William Collins, William Cowper, Robert Burns, William Blake

Module

Topics Covered

Module 1

Beginning of Romanticism – Percy's Reliques, French Revolution, Return to Nature, Subjectivity, Language

Module 2

Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Module 3

Early Romantics – William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyric, Ode

Module 4

Later Romantics – Lord Byron, P.B. Shelley, John Keats

Module 5

Gothic Novel – Mary Shelley, Horace Walpole

Module 6

Historical Novel – Walter Scott, Domestic Novel, Jane Austen

Module 7

Romantic Prose – Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey

Module 8

Early Feminist Writing – J.S. Mill (The Subjection of Women), Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)

Module 9

Beginning of the Victorian Age – Socio-political Background, Victorian Compromise

Module 10

Victorian Poetry – Alfred Tennyson, Dramatic Monologue, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold

Module 11

Pre-Raphaelite Movement – D.G. Rossetti, A.C. Swinburne, William Morris

Module 12

Aestheticism – Walter Pater, Art for Art's Sake

Module 13

Victorian Prose – Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Cardinal Newman, Religious Prose

Module 14

Victorian Biography and Autobiography – John Ruskin, Lytton Strachey, Leslie Stephen

Module 15

Victorian Novel – Reform Acts, Industrialisation, Charles Dickens

Module 16

Thomas Hardy – Wessex Novels

Module 17

Victorian Women Novelists – Brontë Sisters, George Eliot, Realistic Novels, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Meredith, R.L. Stevenson

Module 18

Victorian Drama – Comedy of Manners, Oscar Wilde, Discussion Plays, George Bernard Shaw

Module 19

Transition Poetry – Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inscape, Instress, Sprung Rhythm, The Windhover

Module 20

Victorian Age and Colonial Enterprise – Macaulay's Minute, Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Rudyard Kipling

Module

Topics Covered

Module 1

Edwardian Period – World War I, Socio-political Background

Module 2

War Poets – Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon

Module 3

Pink Poets – W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice

Module 4

Avant-garde Writing – Symbolist Movement, W.B. Yeats, Surrealism, Dylan Thomas

Module 5

Modernist Poetry – High Modernists, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot

Module 6

Verse Drama – Christopher Fry, T.S. Eliot

Module 7

World War II and its Aftermath – Movement Poetry, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn

Module 8

Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion

Module 9

Twentieth Century Prose – G.K. Chesterton, Max Beerbohm, Bertrand Russell

Module 10

Twentieth Century Novel – Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, Joseph Conrad

Module 11

Early Modernism – D.H. Lawrence, Psychological Novel

Module 12

Stream of Consciousness – James Joyce, Virginia Woolf

Module 13

Dystopian Literature – Aldous Huxley, George Orwell

Module 14

Post-war Fiction – William Golding, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Allan Sillitoe

Module 15

Modern Drama – Henrik Ibsen and His Influence, George Bernard Shaw

Module 16

Irish Dramatic Movement – Abbey Theatre, Celtic Revival, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey

Module 17

Post-war Drama – Kitchen Sink Drama, Arnold Wesker, Angry Young Men Movement, John Osborne

Module 18

Theatre of the Absurd – Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Epic Theatre, Edward Bond

Module 19

Recent Trends in British Writing – Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson

Module 20

Immigrant Writing – Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi

Module

Topics Covered

Module 1

Pilgrim Fathers, Puritanism in America, American Romanticism, Emerson, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Module 2

Nineteenth & Twentieth Century American Poetry – Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe

Module 3

Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton

Module 4

Nineteenth Century American Novel – Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Faulkner, Henry James

Module 5

Twentieth Century American Novel – Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Leslie Marmon Silko

Module 6

Harlem Renaissance & American Drama – Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka

Module 7

Beginnings of Indian English Poetry – Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu

Module 8

Modern Indian English Poetry – Nissim Ezekiel, Keki N. Daruwalla, A.K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Dom Moraes, Gieve Patel, Arun Kolatkar

Module 9

Early Indian English Novel – Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh

Module 10

Contemporary Indian English Novel – Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy

Module 11

Indian English Drama – Harindranath Chattopadhyay, T.P. Kailasam, Asif Currimbhoy, Badal Sircar, Girish Karnad, Manjula Padmanabhan

Module 12

African Literature & Colonialism – Léopold Sédar Senghor, Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka

Module 13

African Literature & Postcolonialism – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, John Pepper Clark, Ben Okri, Athol Fugard

Module 14

Caribbean Intellectual Tradition – Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James

Module 15

Caribbean Literary Tradition – V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Module 16

Canadian Literature – Modernism, E.J. Pratt, Sinclair Ross, Tomson Highway, Margaret Laurence

Module 17

Contemporary Canadian Literature – Multiculturalism, Diaspora, Claire Harris, Rohinton Mistry, Joy Kogawa, Michael Ondaatje

Module 18

Australian Literary History – Bush Poetry, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, Les Murray

Module 19

Modern Australian Literature – Patrick White, Sally Morgan, David Malouf, David Williamson

Module 20

South Asian Literature – Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, Romesh Gunesekera, Edwin Thumboo, Alamgir Hashmi, Maki Kureishi, Taslima Nasreen

Module

Topics Covered

Module 1

Sound System of English – Vowels and Consonants

Module 2

English Phonology – Syllable Structure, Stress, Connected Speech, Intonation, Assimilation, Elision, Weak Forms

Module 3

English Morphology – Morphemes, Word Formation, Affixation

Module 4

Semantics – Types of Meaning, Semantic Change

Module 5

Indo-European Family of Languages – Origin of English, Germanic Family, Grimm's Law, Verner's Law

Module 6

Old English – Dialects, Grammar, Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Literature, Scandinavian Influence

Module 7

Middle English – Norman French Influence, Grammar, Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Literature, Bible Translations

Module 8

English at the Renaissance – Influence of Latin and Greek, Colonialism, Contributions of Shakespeare and Milton

Module 9

English Overseas – American English, Indian English, Pidgins and Creoles

Module 10

English in the Postcolonial World – English as a Global Language, World Englishes

Module 11

Approaches to Language Learning – Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, Social Constructivism, Critical Pedagogy

Module 12

Theory of Language – Language as Knowledge, Skill, Structure and Behaviour

Module 13

History of English Language Teaching in India – Macaulay, English in Independent India, English as a Language of Opportunity

Module 14

ESL, EFL & ESP – English as a Second Language, Foreign Language and Specific Purposes

Module 15

Methods of Language Teaching – Grammar Translation, Direct Method, Audio-Lingual, Oral-Situational, Silent Way, Community Language Learning

Module 16

Learner Factors – Attitude, Aptitude, Motivation, Age, Learning Environment

Module 17

Classroom Procedures – Lesson Planning, Presentation, Interaction, Feedback, Evaluation, Teaching Prose, Poetry, Grammar and Communication Skills

Module 18

Teaching Materials – Traditional Teaching Aids, Audio-Visual Aids, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)

Module 19

Tests and Evaluation – Formative & Summative Assessment, Continuous Evaluation, Types of Tests, Evaluation Tools

Module 20

Keywords – Bilingualism, Multilingualism, L1 & L2, Language Acquisition, Code Mixing, Code Switching, First Language Interference

Module

Topics Covered

Module 1

Aristotle – Poetics, Tragedy, Catharsis, Longinus, Sublime, Sidney's Apology for Poetry, Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare

Module 2

Romantic Criticism – Poetic Diction, Fancy & Imagination, Negative Capability

Module 3

Matthew Arnold – The Function of Criticism, T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, Objective Correlative, F.R. Leavis, Practical Criticism

Module 4

William Empson, Ambiguity, Cleanth Brooks, The Language of Paradox, I.A. Richards, New Criticism, Northrop Frye, Archetypes

Module 5

Liberal Humanism, Turn to Theory, Text, Identity, Language, Russian Formalism

Module 6

Marxist Criticism – Karl Marx, Base & Superstructure, Althusser, Gramsci, Neo-Marxism

Module 7

Ferdinand de Saussure, Structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Semiotics

Module 8

Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud, Id, Ego, Sexuality, Unconscious

Module 9

Modernism, Modernity, Jürgen Habermas, Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson

Module 10

Post-Structuralism – Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, Structure, Sign and Play

Module 11

Feminism – Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Elaine Showalter, Feminine Mystique

Module 12

Gender and Sexuality – Judith Butler, Gender Theory, Gender Play

Module 13

Postcolonialism – Edward Said, Bill Ashcroft, Homi K. Bhabha, Hybridity, Mimicry, Race & Ethnicity, Subaltern Studies

Module 14

Cultural Materialism & New Historicism – Jonathan Dollimore, Political Shakespeare, Michel Foucault, Power and Discourse

Module 15

Dalit Aesthetics – B.R. Ambedkar, Namdeo Dhasal, Sharankumar Limbale

Module 16

Translation Studies – Source Text, Target Text, Equivalence, Adaptation, Rewriting, Untranslatability

Module 17

Cultural Studies – Ideology, Hegemony, Frankfurt School, Birmingham School, Raymond Williams, Media & Popular Culture

Module 18

Green Studies – Cheryll Glotfelty, Erich Fromm, Rachel Carson, Vandana Shiva

Module 19

Indian Aesthetics – Bhava, Rasa, Dhvani, Vakrokti

Module 20

Indian Poetics – Alamkara, Anumana, Riti, Sphota, Aucitya

Particular

Paper 1

Paper 2 (English)

Subject

General Knowledge & Aptitude

English

Total Questions

120

120

Total Marks

120

120

Marks per Question

1 Mark

1 Mark

Question Type

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)

Exam Duration

2 Hours

2 Hours

Negative Marking

No

No

Mode of Examination

Offline (OMR Based)

Offline (OMR Based)