Kerala PSC HSST English 2025: Syllabus PDF, Exam Pattern, & Marks Distribution

Preparing for the Kerala PSC HSST English exam? This blog provides a complete, detailed syllabus and exam pattern, covering everything from Early English Literature to Contemporary Indian Writing, American Literature, Linguistics, ELT, Literary Criticism, and Kerala Renaissance. Get ready with a structured guide!

Kerala PSC HSST English Exam 2025 Highlights

Kerala PSC HSST English PYQs 2025 PDF Download

Kerala PSC HSST English Syllabus 2025 PDF Download

For your convenience, the complete Kerala PSC HSST English syllabus 2025 is provided in PDF format. Download the PDF to access the detailed syllabus module-wise, including all authors, works, literary movements, and exam-relevant topics, so you can plan your preparation accordingly.

Kerala PSC HSST English Exam Pattern 2025

• Total Marks: 100
• Total Questions: 100 (1 mark each)
• Cut-off: 1/3 negative marking for wrong answers
• Type: OMR-based multiple-choice questions (MCQs)
• Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes

Kerala PSC HSST English Detailed Syllabus 2025

in addition to the topics detailed below, the question paper may include questions from other subjects prescribed for the educational qualification of the post. There is no guarantee that all the topics listed will appear in the exam, so candidates are advised to prepare comprehensively.

Module 1: Early English Literature to 18th Century

Detailed Study:

• John Donne – Batter My Heart, Canonization

• John Milton – Lycidas, Paradise Lost (Book 9)

• John Dryden – Macflecknoe

• Thomas Gray – Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

• William Shakespeare – Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Sonnets No. 18, 30, 116

• Alexander Pope – Rape of the Lock

• Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus

• Francis Bacon – Of Studies, Of Marriage and Single Life, Of Truth

• Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books

• Robert Burns – A Red, Red Rose

• William Blake – The Tyger, The Lamb

Non-Detailed Study:

• Beowulf

• Ballads – Sir Patrick Spence, Chevy Chase

• Geoffrey Chaucer – Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

• Thomas Kyd – The Spanish Tragedy

• Edmund Spenser – Epithalamion

• Andrew Marvell – To His Coy Mistress

• Richard Sheridan – The School for Scandal

• Sir Thomas More – Utopia

• Henry Fielding – Tom Jones

• Samuel Richardson – Pamela

• Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe

Module 2: Romantic and Victorian Period

Detailed Study:

• William Wordsworth – Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

• Samuel Coleridge – Kubla Khan

• John Keats – Ode to a Nightingale

• P.B. Shelley – Ode to the West Wind

• Lord Byron – The Prisoner of Chillon

• Lord Tennyson – Ulysses, The Lotos Eaters

• Mathew Arnold – The Scholar Gypsy, Dover Beach

• Robert Browning – Andrea del Sarto

• G.M. Hopkins – The Pied Beauty

• Thomas de Quincey – On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth

• Charles Lamb – Oxford in Vacation, Dream Children

• Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest

Non-Detailed Study:

• William Wordsworth – Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

• Olaudah Equiano – The Interesting Narrative (Chapters 4 & 5)

• P.B. Shelley – The Cenci

• Mary Shelley – Frankenstein

• Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

• Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist

• Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Ubervilles

• Jane Austen – Mansfield Park

• Walter Scott – Ivanhoe

Module 3: Twentieth Century British Literature

Detailed Study:

• W.B. Yeats – The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium

• T.S. Eliot – The Wasteland

• W.H. Auden – In Memory of W.B. Yeats

• Dylan Thomas – Poem in October

• Sylvia Plath – Daddy

• Philip Larkin – Church Going

• Carol Ann Duffy – Anne Hathaway

• Ted Hughes – Thought Fox

• Thom Gunn – On the Move

• G.B. Shaw – Pygmalion

• T.S. Eliot – Murder in the Cathedral

• J.M. Synge – Playboy of the Western World

• Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot

• Harold Pinter – The Birthday Party

• T.S. Eliot – Tradition and Individual Talent

• Virginia Woolf – Modern Fiction

Non-Detailed Study:

• F.R. Leavis – The Great Tradition

• Joseph Conrad – The Heart of Darkness

• Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway

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

• George Orwell – 1984

• John Fowles – The French Lieutenant’s Woman

• Angela Carter – Nights at the Circus

• Caryl Churchill – Top Girls

Module 4: Indian Writing in English

Detailed Study:

• Rabindranath Tagore – Poems 1–20 from Gitanjali

• Sri Aurobindo – The Trance of Waiting

• Sarojini Naidu – Coromandel Fishers

• Kamala Das – My Grandmother’s House, Freaks

• Nissim Ezekiel – Background, Casually

• A.K. Ramanujan – A River, The Striders

• Girish Karnad – Nagamandala

• Manjula Padmanabhan – Harvest

• Mahesh Dattani – Dance Like a Man

• S.N. Dasgupta – The Theory of Rasa

• Kunjunni Raja – Theory of Dhvani

Non-Detailed Study:

• Vijay Tendulkar – The Court is in Session

• Mulk Raj Anand – The Untouchable

• Raja Rao – The Serpent and the Rope

• Anita Desai – Clear Light of Day

• R.K. Narayan – Malgudi Days

• Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children

• Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things

• Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger

• A.K. Ramanujan – Is there an Indian Way of Thinking: An Informal Essay

Module 5: American Literature

Detailed Study:

• Walt Whitman – Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

• Emily Dickinson – I Felt a Funeral

• Robert Frost – Home Burial

• Wallace Stevens – Sunday Morning

• Edgar Allan Poe – The Raven

• Maya Angelou – Phenomenal Woman

• Eugene O’Neill – Emperor Jones

• Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie

Non-Detailed Study:

• Emerson – Self-Reliance

• Thoreau – Civil Disobedience

• Arthur Miller – Death of a Salesman

• E.E. Cummings – Buffalo Hills

• Allen Ginsberg – America

• Gertrude Stein – Daughter

• Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter

• Herman Melville – Moby Dick

• Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea

• Toni Morrison – The Bluest Eye

Module 6: Structure of English Language and Linguistics

• Indo-European Family of Languages: Old English, Middle English, Modern English

• Phonetics & Phonology: General Phonetics, Phonetic Transcription, Stress, Intonation

• Morphology: Traditional & Modern Grammar, Form Class Words, Function Class Words, Fallacies, Saussure, Structuralism

• Syntax: PS Grammar, TG Grammar, Deep Structure, Surface Structure, Chomsky’s Trace Theory, Case Grammar, Systemic, Stratification, Tagmemics

• Semantics: Lexical Semantics, Metaphor, Figures of Speech

• Linguistics: Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics

Module 7: English Language Teaching (ELT)

• Key Concepts: ESL, EFL, Mother Tongue Interference

• Methods: Grammar Translation, Direct, Audio-Visual, Suggestopaedia, Community Language Learning

• Learning Theories: Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Constructivism

• Learner Factors, Teaching Aids, ICT

• Types of Tests, Tools for Evaluation, Error Analysis, Remedial Teaching

Module 8: Literary Criticism and Theory

• Aristotle – Poetics

• Philip Sidney – An Apologie for Poetry

• Samuel Coleridge – Biographia Literaria (Ch.14)

• Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

• T.S. Eliot – Tradition and Individual Talent

• Northrop Frye – Archetypes of Literature

• Cleanth Brooks – The Language of Paradox

• Edmund Wilson – Marxism and Literature

• Elaine Showalter – Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness

• Jacques Derrida – Difference

• Karl Marx – The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

• Sigmund Freud – The Conscious and the Unconscious, The Id and the Ego, The Ego and the Super-Ego, Beyond the Pleasure Principles and Other Writings

• Jurgen Habermas – Modernity: An Incomplete Project

• Raymond Williams – Tradition, Institution, Formations

• Stephen Greenblatt – Shakespeare and the Exorcists

• Michel Foucault – Power/Knowledge, The Unities of Discourse

• Edward W. Said – Introduction to Orientalism

• Helen Cixous – The Laugh of the Medusa

• Eve Sedgwick – Epistemology of the Closet

Module 9: Cultural Studies

• Theodor W. Adorno – Culture Industry Reconsidered

• Stuart Hall – Encoding/Decoding

• Laura Mulvey – Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

• Judith Butler – Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire

• Angela McRobbie – Postmodernism and Popular Culture

Module 10: Teaching Aptitude

• Teaching: Nature, Objectives, Characteristics, Basic Requirements

• Learner’s Characteristics

• Factors Affecting Teaching

• Methods of Teaching

• Teaching Aids

• Evaluation Systems

Module 11: Research Aptitude

• Research: Meaning, Characteristics, Types

• Steps of Research

• Methods of Research

• Research Ethics

• Paper, Article, Workshop, Seminar, Conference, Symposium

• Thesis Writing: Characteristics & Format

Module 12: Salient Features of Indian Constitution

• Preamble – Significance and Place in Interpretation of Constitution

• Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles of State Policy, Fundamental Duties

• Executive, Legislature, Judiciary – Union and State Level, Other Constitutional Authorities

• Centre-State Relations: Legislative, Administrative, Financial

• Services under Union and States

• Emergency Provisions

• Amendment Provisions

Module 13: Social Welfare Legislations and Programmes

• Right to Information Act, Prevention of Atrocities Against Women & Children, Food Security Act, Environmental Acts

• Social Welfare Programmes: Employment Guarantee Programme, Organ & Blood Donation

Module 14: Renaissance in Kerala

• English Education: Missionary Organisations, Educational Institutions, Factories, Printing Press

• Socio-Religious Reform Movements: SNDP Yogam, Nair Service Society, Yogakshema Sabha, Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham, Vaala Samudaya Parishkarani Sabha, Samathwa Samajam, Islam Dharma Paripalana Sangham, Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha, Sahodara Prasthanam

• Struggles & Social Revolts: Upper Cloth Revolt, Channar Agitation, Vaikom Satyagraha, Guruvayoor Satyagraha, Paliyam Satyagraha, Kuttamkulam Satyagraha, Temple Entry Proclamation & Temple Entry Act, Malayalee Memorial, Ezhava Memorial, Malabar Riots, Civil Disobedience Movement, Abstention Movement

• Role of Press: Malayalee, Swadeshabhimani, Vivekodayam, Mithavadi, Swaraj, Malayala Manorama, Bhashaposhini, Mathrubhumi, Kerala Kaumudi, Samadarsi, Kesari, Al-Ameen, Prabhatham, Yukthivadi

• Awakening through Literature: Novel, Drama, Poetry, Purogamana Sahithya Prasthanam, Nataka Prasthanam, Library Movement

• Women & Social Change: Parvathi Nenmenimangalam, Arya Pallam, A.V. Kuttimalu Amma, Lalitha Prabhu, Akkamma Cheriyan, Anna Chandi, Lalithambika Antharjanam

• Leaders of Renaissance: Thycaud Ayya Vaikundar, Sree Narayana Guru, Ayyan Kali, Chattampi Swamikal, Brahmananda Sivayogi, Vagbhadananda, Poikayil Yohannan (Kumara Guru), Dr. Palpu, Palakkunnath Abraham Malpan, Mampuram Thangal, Sahodaran Ayyappan, Pandit K.P. Karuppan, Pampadi John Joseph, Mannathu Padmanabhan, V.T. Bhattathirippad, Vakkom Abdul Khadar Maulavi, Makthi Thangal, Blessed Elias Kuriakose Chaavra, Barrister G.P. Pillai, T.K. Madhavan, Moorkoth Kumaran, C. Krishnan, K.P. Kesava Menon, Dr. Ayyathan Gopalan, C.V. Kunjuraman, Kuroor Neelakantan Namboothiripad, Velukkutty Arayan, K.P. Vellon, P.K. Chathan Master, K. Kelappan, P. Krishna Pillai, A.K. Gopalan, T.R. Krishnaswami Iyer, C. Kesavan, Swami Ananda Theerthan, M.C. Joseph, Kuttippuzha Krishnapillai

• Literary Figures: Kodungallur Kunhikkuttan Thampuran, Kerala Varma Valiyakoyi Thampuran, Kandathil Varghese Mappila, Kumaran Asan, Vallathol Narayana Menon, Ulloor S. Parameswara Iyer, G. Sankara Kurup, Changampuzha Krishna Pillai, Chandu Menon, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Kesav Dev, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Ponkunnam Varky, S.K. Pottakkad

Module 15: General Knowledge & Current Affairs

• General Knowledge and Current Affairs

How to Download HSST English Syllabus 2025 PDF

• Visit the Kerala PSC official website: https://www.keralapsc.gov.in
• Go to the “Recruitments” section on the homepage.
• Click on “Syllabus” or “Post-wise Syllabus” from the dropdown menu.
• Find the HSST English post in the list of posts.
• Click on the syllabus link for HSST English.
• The syllabus will open in PDF format.
• Download or save the PDF to your device