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150 multiple-choice questions and 45 flashcards, written to the AP English Literature blueprint. Every question carries a full rationale.
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AP English Literature, Common Core ELA 11-12 reading literature, IB English A: Literature
CoStudy's The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) bank holds 195 items. Every multiple-choice question carries a written rationale explaining why the correct answer is correct and why each distractor is tempting but wrong.
A sample of 12 multiple-choice questions from the bank, with the full rationale shown.
At the moment of the stabbing, the household hears:
Answer: B — A scream + a crash from the locked attic
A/C/D) Wrong. B) Correct — the cry summons the servants who break in.
Dorian moves the portrait to the attic after:
Answer: C — He notices its altered mouth + fears it being seen
A/B/D) Wrong. C) Correct — the move is a defensive concealment of the soul-image.
The 'double life' theme means:
Answer: C — Public respectability + private corruption coexisting in one body, externalized in the portrait
A/B/D) Wrong. C) Correct — late-Victorian England is rich in such doubles.
Dramatic irony in the novel runs on:
Answer: D — The reader's knowledge of the portrait's change + the unaware society judging Dorian on his face
A/C/B) Wrong. D) Correct — the gap between portrait + public face is the engine of irony.
Why is the novel a perennial AP Lit anchor?
Answer: B — Tight structure, aphoristic style, doppelgänger form, philosophical depth, ethics-of-art questions
A/C/D) Wrong. B) Correct — every dimension yields close-reading material; the novel pairs with Frankenstein + Jekyll/Hyde and rewards both formal + ethical analysis.
The novel's 1891 Preface itself was published earlier as:
Answer: D — A separately printed list of aphorisms in The Fortnightly Review (1891) before being attached to the book
A/C/B) Wrong. D) Correct — Wilde first published the Preface as criticism, then folded it into the book.
Lord Henry's wife, Victoria, exits the novel by:
Answer: D — Running off with another man — Henry treats it as mildly inconvenient
A/C/B) Wrong. D) Correct — Wilde uses the throwaway as another satirical brushstroke on Henry's detachment.
Preface paraphrase: vice + virtue, for the artist, are:
Answer: D — Materials of art — neither moral lessons nor confessions
A/C/B) Wrong. D) Correct — Wilde treats moral content as raw material.
Lord Henry doesn't actually live by his own philosophy because:
Answer: B — Wilde's joke: words act on listeners more than on speakers. Henry observes; Dorian acts
A/C/D) Reductive. B) Correct — the imbalance is central to the novel's critique of influence + corruption.
In the opening scene, who is painting Dorian?
Answer: B — Basil Hallward
A) Visiting friend. B) Correct — Basil is the painter; the portrait is what he calls his masterpiece. C/D) Wrong.
Wilde's critique of bourgeois moralism in the novel is delivered through:
Answer: A — Henry's epigrams + the dinner-party scenes, where polite society's hypocrisies become punch lines
B/C/D) Wrong. A) Correct — the satire moves through dialogue, not exposition.
After sparing Hetty, the portrait grows worse because:
Answer: A — Wilde reads the act as vanity, not virtue — Dorian wanted to feel good, not to do good
B/C/D) Wrong. A) Correct — the moment exposes Dorian's continued aesthetic self-regard.
6 sample cards from the 45 in the bank.
Why was the 1890 version scandalous?
Reviewers attacked it as immoral + decadent — especially for its homoerotic undercurrents. Wilde wrote the 1891 Preface partly in defense.
Who is James Vane?
Sibyl's sailor brother. Vows revenge on the 'Prince Charming' who ruins her. Years later hunts Dorian.
Why does Dorian break with Sibyl?
After agreeing to marry him, Sibyl loses her ability to act — she now feels real love + Shakespeare seems hollow. Dorian sees her bad performance + cruelly rejects her.
Famous adaptations?
1945 MGM film (Hurd Hatfield); BBC 1976; Stuart Townsend in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003); 2009 film (Ben Barnes); multiple stage versions + the 1891 text itself remains iconic.
The novel's most-quoted aphorisms?
'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.' 'I can resist everything except temptation.' These are Lord Henry's lines + Wilde's signature mode.
Queer readings of the novel?
Modern criticism reads the intense male triangle (Basil's devotion to Dorian; Lord Henry's seduction-by-talk) + the novel's coded vocabulary as central, not incidental.
These samples are a small slice. The full bank runs flashcards, multiple choice and timed mock exams with per-chapter progress tracking, on the web and in the iOS app.
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The The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) bank holds 195 items: 150 multiple-choice questions, 45 flashcards. 18 of them are on this page to read free, with no signup.
Yes. Every multiple-choice item carries a written rationale that states the controlling principle behind the correct answer and then addresses each wrong option in turn — why it tempts and precisely where it fails. Knowing why the plausible answer was wrong is worth more than knowing which letter was right.
The samples on this page are free to read in full, rationales included, with no account. The complete 195-item bank, the timed mock exams and per-chapter progress tracking are part of CoStudy on the web and in the iOS app.
Last reviewed 2026-08-22. Banks are written against the certifying body's published exam outline and re-checked when that outline changes — exams get renumbered, retired and reweighted, and a bank written to a superseded outline teaches the wrong proportions. Figures that are re-indexed annually are deliberately not asserted as rules; the questions test the governing principle instead.