ENGL120 Midterm Study Guide: Terms, Periods, and Concepts

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering literary terms, critical concepts, historical periods, and theatrical associations for the ENGL120 midterm examination.

Literary history

Studying a text in relation to other texts and in relation to the historical context that produced it.

National epic

A long heroic narrative associated with a people's shared identity, origins, or collective memory.

Imagined community

A community whose members understand themselves as sharing identity, heritage, language, or territory even when they do not know one another personally.

Necessary community

Community understood through practical interdependence, in which people need others to survive and function.

Gift-giving / reciprocity

The exchange of gifts that creates or confirms social bonds and expectations of loyalty or service.

Weregild

Compensation paid for injury or killing to address harm and potentially prevent or settle feud.

Oral poetry

Poetry performed and remembered through spoken performance, where the singer's retelling preserves communal memory.

Romance

A narrative mode often involving adventure, love, courtly society, and difficult social or family problems.

Moral fantasy

The lecture's term for romance's ability to move social problems into a fantasy realm where they can be resolved differently.

Courtly love

A literary convention shaping idealized or socially constrained desire whose contradictions are emphasized in romance.

Lai

A short narrative poem or story associated with romance, such as the Anglo-Norman French works of Marie de France.

Fabliau

A comic, often bawdy narrative driven by trickery, sexual desire, and humiliation.

Beast fable

A story in which animals speak or act like humans, often allowing comic or pointed social commentary.

Chivalry

A set of knightly ideals and behaviors, including courage, courtesy, loyalty, and honor.

Troth

A pledge, oath, or bond whose keeping or breaking becomes a test of trustworthiness.

Pentangle

The five-pointed symbol associated with Gawain's virtues and his idealized perfection as a knight.

Untrawthe

Untruth or unfaithfulness; Gawain's term for the moral failure he associates with keeping the green girdle.

Green girdle

The object Gawain keeps to protect himself from death, which later becomes a token of fear, self-preservation, and failure.

Irony

A gap between the apparent meaning or presentation and what readers are invited to recognize.

Characterization

The methods a text uses to represent people through behavior, appearance, occupation, possessions, and speech.

Experience vs. authority

The Wife of Bath's distinction between personal lived experience and authoritative written or religious texts.

Frame narrative

A larger narrative structure that contains or introduces other stories or speakers, as seen in The Canterbury Tales.

Taxonomy

In the Mandeville lecture, the cataloguing and classifying of the characteristics and customs of peoples and places.

Desire

In the Mandeville lecture, the representation of distant places or cultures as fascinating, attractive, or worth wanting.

Ethnography

Describing peoples, customs, and cultural differences, examining how such descriptions construct the unfamiliar.

Utopia

An imagined society used to examine social and political arrangements, in which description does not automatically equal endorsement.

Institution

An organization, rule system, norm, or belief structure that regulates social behavior, such as law, family, religion, and government.

Mercantilism

An economic framework emphasized in the early modern lecture, compared in the slides with state-planned Utopian economic practices.

Humanism

An early modern cultural movement associated in the lecture with classical learning and the study of texts.

Philology

The study of language and texts, especially their history, forms, and interpretation.

Antiquarianism

An interest in recovering and studying the past, including its texts, artifacts, and traditions.

Mystery play / pageant

A dramatic presentation of biblical history, often part of a larger cycle and staged in a public religious festival.

Corpus Christi

The Catholic feast, occurring annually usually in late May, associated with the performance of the York mystery plays.

Guild

A trade organization; in the York cycle, guilds were associated with staging particular pageants rather than individual playwrights.

Pageant

An individual dramatic unit within a larger cycle of biblical plays.

Lyric

A relatively short poem centered on a voice, feeling, thought, or moment.

Petrarchan lyric

A lyric tradition shaped by Petrarch and later European imitations that engages with courtly love and inherited lyric conventions.

Speaker vs. author

The principle that the voice speaking in a poem is not automatically identical to the historical author.

Textual ambiguity

A text's deliberate or unresolved uncertainty, particularly when evaluating whether More directly endorses his imagined society.

Early Middle Ages

The course periodization spanning c. 410–1066, linking early English history with migration and the development of kingdoms in Britain.

High Middle Ages

The course periodization spanning 1067–1300, starting after the Norman Conquest and noted for romances written in Middle English and Anglo-Norman French.

Late Middle Ages

The course periodization spanning 1301–1453, encompassing authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain-poet.

Early Modern Period

The course periodization spanning 1453–1660, linked with humanism, overseas expansion, mercantilism, the Reformation, and Counter-Reformation.

Peasants' Revolt

An uprising in early June 1381 where English serfs entered London through Aldgate to rebel against Richard II over heavy taxation; alluded to in Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale.

York Barkers

The trade guild responsible for staging Pageant 1, The Creation and Fall of the Rebel Angels, in the York mystery play cycle.

York Pinners

The trade guild responsible for staging Pageant 35, The Play of the Crucifixion, in the York mystery play cycle.

York Mercers

The trade guild responsible for staging Pageant 47, The Play of the Last Judgment, in the York mystery play cycle.