British Literature: Unit 1 Parts 2 & 3

Only the clergy receive ridicule in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

“His mighty mouth was like a furnace door. / . . . His was a master-hand at stealing grain.”

Chaucer’s presentation of human society in The Canterbury Tales is set against what backdrop in the first forty lines of

Which of these is not characteristic of a typical ballad?

The main goal of satire is to ridicule a person, group, or institution so that it is publicly demeaned.

“[He] so had set / His wits to work, none knew he was in debt”

What two principles of aesthetics do many short lyric poems rely upon?

an issue or circumstances that violate a reader’s expectations

The original plan for The Canterbury Tales projected about how many stories?

Ballads often deal with the topic of

Mock Epic

Which of the following works is not one of the great masterpieces of Middle English poetry?

The oldest known poem written in Old English is “The Cuckoo Song.”

Most surviving medieval plays were written by ____ and for _____.

Riddles and songs were used only for secular, not sacred, purposes.

Bede’s work is a key source of information about the Anglo-Saxons before the time of Alfred the Great.