I did the whole practice subject GRE in English the other night. The good news is that I got more questions right than wrong, and, assuming I performed all the incantations and rituals necessary to convert the scores from raw to the 200-800 scale, it looks like on that particular version of the test, I made somewhere between a 650 and a 700.
There are four areas I'm going to fail miserably at on any version. My biblical knowledge is very, very poor. My ability to understand reference to classical Greek and Roman literature is not much better. And I completely bypassed the Jacobean through Restoration periods in my coursework, with the grudging exceptions of Paradise Lost and some Herbert. I'm hopeless with literary critics. (Also, for some reason, on the four questions that featured one, the other, or both of them, I consistently mixed up T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. I obviously need to look up both of them. Didn't one of them write the book Cats is based on...?)
But hey, for most of the Romantics, the Victorians, the Modernists, the Postmodernists, and anyone after them, I'm golden. I'm pretty good with the medievals, thanks to Anglo-Saxon and a bit of spare-time Chaucer reading, and as long as they avoid references to Rome, I can do the eighteenth century folks. I'm not half bad at Shakespeare, either, courtesy of the Twenty-Pound Red Book of All Shakespeare from Exeter, and I can take a better-than-average stab at his contemporaries.
...I'm so jinxed myself into getting the hardest test ever next month. Crap.
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